During the early 1980s, in my last three years at high school, I developed a passion for everything Bavarian: the soccer team Bayern München, Lederhosen, the dialect, and, of course, the Bavarian Party, the CSU,[530] which exists in Bavaria only. I also became a fan of Franz-Josef Strauß, who for many decades was chairman of this party and became kind of a symbol for everything Bavarian. I surely would have joined the CSU, also because of its strong conservative views, but unfortunately this party was open only to those residing in Bavaria, where I never lived.

At that time, I also joined the youth organization of Germany's semi-conservative party CDU,[531] but was active only a short time, because when my university studies took me to Bonn in 1983, I abandoned all political commitments for the time being.

When I started to study chemistry at University of Bonn in the fall of 1983, Bonn, then capital of West Germany, was a hotbed of anti-government demonstrations mainly by leftist students. The German federal government, lead by CDU and CSU, had agreed to the stationing of Pershing middle range nuclear weapons in Germany by the US. Armed Forces and also planned a census of the German population. Both infuriated the German left, who was strongly opposed to any foreign military presence in Germany and to any governmental intrusion into the privacy of German citizens.[532] I, on the other hand, took the position held by the German Federal government led by CDU/CSU, arguing for the census and for the stationing of U.S. nuclear weapons to deter the Soviets.

However, my involvement was abruptly curbed when CSU chairman Strauß engineered a one billion Deutschmark loan to communist East Germany, a deal that contradicted everything Strauß stood for, in particular, the principle that one should never do business with the totalitarian powers of the East, unless some reciprocal benefit was forthcoming. The reciprocal benefit here, however, was only imaginary in that East Germany's communist government promised to remove the 'robot' machine guns on the inner-German border, which automatically killed or maimed every German trying to pass from totalitarian East Germany to 'Golden' West Germany. Subsequently, these atrocious weapons were indeed removed, but this was accompanied by the construction of a second border fence further inland. As a result, the inner-German border became even more impenetrable. Hence, Strauß' deal did not lead to any humane relief for the East Germans, but instead stabilized East Germany's economy, thus delaying its-as we know today-unavoidable final collapse for a few more years. From today's perspective, my criticism at the time was entirely justified. But at that time, it was the opinion of a separate minority only, a minority subject to ridicule-it was a 'peculiar view'.

First jail experience

In October 1983, I had joined a Catholic student fraternity, founded in Königsberg (East Prussia) in the late 1800s, but relocated to Bonn after WWII. At the end of WWII, almost the entire German population of East Prussia either fled or was murdered and expelled by the invading Soviets who divided this old German province in two parts, annexed the northern part and gave the southern part to Poland. In 1984, a 'brother' of this fraternity persuaded me to accompany him on a trip to Czechoslovakia in February of that same year. This fraternity brother was a student of Catholic theology and had adopted the cause of the suppressed Catholic Church in the then still Stalinist Czechoslovakia. Also, he had acquaintances there, and his parents were from the Sudetenland, a once purely German border region of Czechia, from where most Sudeten-Germans had been expelled or murdered after WWII by the Czechs. This fraternity brother of mine believed and fought for the rights both of the small Sudeten-German minority still living in Czechoslovakia and for the expelled Sudeten-Germans, most of whom had resettled in Bavaria and Austria after WWII.

With the knowledge and support of the Catholic Church, we attempted to smuggle theological and political books, as well as a photocopier, to a Catholic congregation in Prague. Our political literature included, for example, a Czech edition of George Orwell's 1984, which was forbidden in the then Czechoslovakian Socialist Soviet Republic. Although the books arrived at their destination, the photocopier was discovered at the border and my fraternity brother, another person traveling with us and myself were immediately confined to prison at Pilsen in the west of Czechoslovakia. After two weeks of nervous waiting, without any contact to the outside world, during which I was interrogated twice, I was told I could leave. My fraternity brother, however, was later sentenced to a year's imprisonment. He was forced to remain in jail for ten months until Christmas time 1984, when German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher intervened and managed to get him released early.

Justice, not brute force

For many others, this experience might possibly have convinced them to leave controversial topics well enough alone. For me, it was the opposite. Because when I find that I have been the victim of injustice, my reaction is to fight until amends are made.

It was at this time that I became familiar with the dark side of the Communist dictatorship. I swore to myself in prison, once I was set free, I would combat the evil of Communism.

During the following year and a half, I became more involved with those who had been the victim of expulsions: firstly, because my father had been expelled from the east German province Silesia, together with millions of German compatriots (after WWII, Silesia was annexed by Poland and is now its southwestern part); secondly, probably as a result of memories of the fraternity brother mentioned above; and thirdly, from a conviction that the expulsion and persecution of East Germans by the communist dictatorships of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, and the USSR was one of the greatest crimes in history, a crime which ought never be forgotten, trivialized or minimized, approved or justified. Parallels with the arguments invariably made in regards to the persecution of the Jews inevitably come to mind.

First political thoughts

The year 1985 was marked by two events:

First, the so-called Engelhard[533] Law was discussed and finally enacted, according to which the offense to dispute, diminish, or justify the crimes of the National Socialist regime, or any other tyrannical regime, will be prosecuted automatically, without anybody needing to file a complaint. The original intention of those who started this discussion-the leftist Social-Democrats-was to make it easier for the legal system to prosecute 'Holocaust deniers', without the necessity of a complaint by some Jewish individual or organization. Certain segments of Germany's semi-conservative party-especially those lobbying for the German expellees-demanded that this law should also apply to anyone minimizing or justifying the crimes of other dictatorships, for example, those who minimized or justified the criminal post-war expulsion of Germans from east Germany and eastern Europe.

In this discussion, I vigorously took sides on the wing of the conservatives often disparagingly referred to as the 'steel helmet fraction'. By then, I had frequently experienced that those working and arguing on behalf of the German expellees are confronted with the argument that the Germans in general and the German expellees in particular have no right to insist on their claims, even if they were supported by international law.

After all, since Germany under Hitler had wanted war and started war, and since so much guilt had accumulated as a result of the 'extermination' or 'intended extermination' of the Jews and Slavs, any subsequent crimes committed against Germans by the peoples of Eastern Europe must be viewed as mere recompense. One had to take this view for the sake of a peaceful life. But by so doing, crimes, when committed against Germans by non-Germans, are considered to constitute a counterbalance to German crimes against other nationals, and are thus accepted as 'fair punishment'. This is common practice, it is a matter of good conduct in Germany to see it this way. But you will be sorry, should it ever enter your mind to turn this argument around and compare and counterbalance German crimes, actual or alleged, with those of other nationalities. This is, of course, verboten! In fact, continual reminders of German crimes, whether true or not, were and are still used to suppress any memory of crimes committed against my own people, the Germans, or to discuss justified claims resulting from the allied crimes.

No doubts about the indisputable

Certainly, it would have been possible to try and dispute these German crimes, actual or alleged, as a means of overcoming the obstacles of discussing the crimes committed against Germans. But this course of action was not open to me, since I could neither argue nor act against my strongly held convictions. I was a firm believer in the standard historical account of the extermination of the Jews. This approach was therefore closed to me-it did not even occur to me as a theoretical possibility. The only available way was to take the position that two wrongs do not make a right, and no good could ever come of a wrong. This applies to the National Socialist persecution of the Jews as well as to the expulsion of the Germans.

Tackling the Zeitgeist

The second significant event of 1985 was my joining a political party called Republikaner (not to be confused with the US Republicans). I made contact with this party through my involvement with the youth branch of an organization of Silesian Germans. At that time, these Republikaner were relatively unknown and their members were thought of as conservative patriots, but not as a right-wing radicals. I discovered that this party had originated from a split with Bavaria's conservative party CSU. The reason for some members of the CSU to leave this party and form their own was dissatisfaction with the mediation of the billion deutschmark loan to communist East Germany by CSU chairman Franz-Josef Strauß, as already mentioned. The party appeared to me as a kind of nation-wide CSU-minus the fear and trembling in the face of the Eastern bloc, and minus the marked patronage of offices and blatant corruption which was noticeable already then.

At first, I thought that this was just the party I had long been looking for, at least with respect to German national politics. However, their handling of the subject of immigrants repelled me, because as a Catholic I was very sensitive to programs or ideas that appeared to be motivated by hostility to foreigners.

An anti-fascist climb-down

The year 1986 was again marked by two events:

First, I came to realize that the Republikaner, at least in the Bonn-Siegburg districts, were mostly a collection of hard-core right-wingers who had been expelled from East Germany after WWII. At the only membership meeting that I attended, it was obvious to me that they could not find anything more important to talk about than the question of whether and to what extent West Prussia was German, and whether territorial claims to it could be asserted. This complete withdrawal from political reality accompanied by a failure to recognize that which was politically necessary at the time the world was debating the reunion of West and East Germany, contributed to my decision to leave the Party.

The most compelling reason for my decision was a recognition that the party included more than a few former members of the right-wing radical party NPD,[534] with whom I wanted no contact. After a membership of half a year, I left the party in early or middle 1986.

The second event that I wish to discuss here took place in January 1986, at a convention to celebrate the 115th anniversary of the founding of the German Reich in 1871, organized by the student fraternity Verein Deutscher Studenten (VDSt, Association of German Students), and held in Frankfurt. It was at this convention that I first learned that the VDSt Frankfurt was a nationalistically oriented student organization. And it was after this celebration that I had a long argument with a student member of this organization who claimed to be a member of the nationalist party NPD. The subject of our argument was the extermination of the Jews. He maintained that the established description did not fit the facts, and that there were not, in reality, six million victims, but three million at most. I was appalled by this manner of argument, and will explain why.

Repulsive numbers juggling

First, there was the natural repugnance aroused by a line of argument which tended merely to diminish a few numbers, although the issue is not really the actual numbers, but the intention behind the deed. My belief at that time was that Hitler had planned to exterminate the Jews, and had done whatever had been necessary to accomplish this goal. The actual 'how' and 'how many' were of secondary importance.

From the student's style of argument, it was clear that he had strong political motives for his way of thinking. He spoke of the use of the 'Auschwitz bludgeon' against the political right, and in particular, against his party. His mixture of political objectives and scientific argumentation made me skeptical. I could not take his arguments at face value, because I was unable to trust him. I silently reproached him for his political involvement, believing that he was no longer willing or able to distinguish between truth and falsehood, between the justified and the unjustified.

I have forgotten his exact arguments and conclusions. Perhaps I do him an injustice, but I still retain a bitter taste of his unbending, politically-motivated way of thinking. It is possible that this is merely an impression I had, because at the time, I thought of all NPD members as extremists with dishonest intentions. It is therefore possible that it wasn't the NPD member who had a distorted view of things, but rather, that I saw him distortedly by my own prejudices. That question will never be answered.

Politics prevents doubt

What can one say today about that event? Although I had dealt with this Holocaust 'denier' and was well aware of the reality of the political misuse of the 'Auschwitz bludgeon' against the political right or right-wing oriented people, this did not lead to my doubting the truth of the usual historical version of the National Socialist persecution of the Jews. The reason was that I could not, and cannot, take seriously any position maintained for obviously political reasons.

In the years that followed, I devoted myself chiefly to my studies; in 1986, I had entered the demanding graduate phase of my studies with subsequent preparation for the Diplom examination.[535] During this period, I abandoned all political activity and withdrew from my work with German refugee organizations and with my student fraternity. This was due not only to my academic work load, but also because I had had my fill of nonsense and no longer cared about activities which were partially unrealistic and mostly useless.

Turks into the 'gas chamber'?

The pressure let up in the year 1989, as I had just completed my Diplom examinations and therefore enjoyed some free time for different intellectual pursuits. The same year was also marked by two significant events.

The first event was the elections for the Berlin Chamber of Deputies, during which the Republikaner gained their famous (or infamous) entry into the city's parliament. Like most people, I was completely surprised by this outcome, since I had lost almost all contact with this party. But, in contrast to most other people, I had some idea of what the Republikaner were, and were not. The horrifying media witch-hunt against this party immediately following the electoral success infuriated me. Characteristic of this witch-hunt was the question posed by a journalist on election eve to Bernhard Andres, then party chairman in Berlin, as to whether the Republikaner wished to do to the Turks what Hitler had done to the Jews. That was when things turned sour. It was clear to me in the flash of a moment's insight that I would rejoin the Republikaner out of pure defiance and democratic solidarity, even if I was displeased by some things about this party. One could take or leave a few isolated party positions as one wished. As long as the party was in compliance with the German constitution, it was entitled to treatment on the basis of equality.

Of course, nothing that has happened since then bears any resemblance to democracy. Party meetings were regularly harassed or prohibited, although Germans were guaranteed the freedom of assembly as a 'basic right'. The print and electronic news media were instructed to report nothing but negative information about this party, a fact not in conformity with the standards of ethics and the legal duty of the publicly-funded news media to report the news with objectivity.

The establishment parties placed the Republikaner beyond the pale of democracy and constitutional politics. It was therefore those establishment parties who had violated the constitutional right of the Republikaner to equal treatment, as well as to the freedoms of expression and assembly.

Professional disbarment due to loyalty to the constitution

One of my close friends, a long-time member of Germany's semi-conservative party CDU, had recently completed his studies in civil administration and was assigned to the city government of a large city in Saxony during his period of practical training. He then received orders from his supervisor, a CDU member, to prohibit the planned regional party convention of the Republikaner. Since it was his specific duty as a civil servant to respect the provisions of the German constitution, he refused to obey these orders on the grounds that the Republikaner were a legally constituted party, the unconstitutionality or undemocratic nature of which has remained unproven. Therefore, in accordance with the principle of equal treatment for political parties, as well as with the rights of free assembly and a respect for the duty of democratic parties to hold regular meetings of their members, their party convention could not lawfully be prohibited.

The consequence of this disobedience was that my friend was told that he would not be able to complete his period of practical training. To avoid forced termination during this period, my friend agreed to a termination agreement to become effective subsequent to this training. His concomitant attempt to fight the agreement in the Labor Court naturally failed. In Germany, those who defend the constitution are dumped on the street, while those who continually violate the constitution enjoy offices and power while the media cheer them on.

'Reprehensible' German unity

I need to discuss another reason for my rejoining the Republikaner in 1989. My belief that one should hold fast to the unity of the German Fatherland has never changed. The left-wing German party SPD[536] had abandoned the goal of reunification in the mid-70s, while the left-wing radical GRÜNE (Greens) had always supported the division of Germany into two independent states. The small liberal party FDP[537] followed in the mid-80s in their support for two independent German states, and towards the end of the 80s, even within the semi-conservative CDU calls to put off the German reunification forever became louder and louder. In this connection (I believe it was in 1987), I remember the commentary of Dr. Helmut Kohl, then leader of the CDU and German chancellor, on a position paper of a certain CDU Member of Parliament, Bernhard Friedmann, concerning German reunification, which Dr. Kohl described as "blooming nonsense". After the political sea-change of 1983, when the semi-conservative/liberal CDU/FDP coalition replaced that of the socialist/liberal SPD/FDP government of the decade before, the new government dissolved all governmental departments in charge of administrative preparations for a German reunification. The left wing of the CDU, under Rita Süssmuth, Heiner Geißler and Norbert Blüm, campaigned openly for dual statehood. In the summer of 1989, the Federal Council of the CDU youth organization Junge Union (Young Union) took the initiative to recommend the deletion of the political goal of German reunification from the party program of the CDU- just a few months before the Berlin Wall fell and Germany actually was reunified!

Now that Germany is reunited, a devastating judgment must be passed upon all the established political parties with regards to their political competence. From the standpoint of the present, the Republikaner were the only party, of those involved at the time, with a correct estimation of the historical and political forces, even if they were subsequently booted out by the turncoats of reunification. I was in the party because all the other parties had abandoned, or were about to abandon in an absolutely unconstitutional manner, the principle of reunification, a principle laid down in the preamble to the German constitution.

It is significant also that my membership in the Republikaner, which ended in the summer of 1991, was later used by the District Court Stuttgart as an indicator of my political mania- in full knowledge of what I have just described. Nowadays, support for the maintenance of constitutional political principles is deemed reprehensible, if not outright illegal. Further comments are superfluous.

Ready to go into a new era...

The young people that streamed into the Republikaner party at that time wanted to do something for German reunification, since this was impossible in almost any other political party. Former members of the CDU, the SPD and the FDP joined, as well as people from right-wing splinter parties and many people who had never been in any party at all. It was a motley group resulting in an unholy chaos. But among us students in Frankfurt, where I completed work for my diploma thesis and later performed my compulsory military service,[538] this plate of mixed vegetables was intellectually very fruitful. In the newly founded Republikaner university organization, we had one former member of the liberal party FDP, one from the socialist party SPD, one from the conservative ecologist party ÖDP,[539] three from the semi-conservative CDU, and many who were active for the first time. During this time, we were flooded with new ideas and discussed controversial issues as never before.

In this Frankfurt period, which ended in late 1990, I read nearly 200 books, mostly during my 'loafer-service' in the Bundeswehr: I read right-wing and left-wing books, books from the middle-of-the-road, and books without any political viewpoint. It was one of the best times I have ever experienced. It was like preparing for an intellectual break-out.

...but instead into the offside

Our interest in involvement with the Republikaner party disappeared due to the fact that it was extremely anti-academic, both in its ranks and leadership. We had to let ourselves be mocked and called greenhorns and academic egg-heads by other members, and the work of our high-school organization was torpedoed by the Republikaner leadership which led to our resignation. From 1990 onwards, the Republikaner party has concerned itself mostly with internal conflicts; since every initiative for constructive work was received with malicious criticism, I resigned in the summer of 1991, about nine months after my relocation to Stuttgart in order to start my PhD studies.

A concentration camp inmate...

Now back to the question of how I became a revisionist. Certainly in the beginning of my second involvement with the Republikaner, I was repeatedly confronted with the use of the 'Auschwitz bludgeon' used against both 'my' party and myself. I have mentioned above the scandalous question of the journalist after the Berlin election, a question which was used continually to suggest that the Republikaner-after they had seized power-intended to 'gas' the Turkish immigrants residing in Germany. Wouldn't it have been easy to have introduced the idea of disputing the Holocaust at such a time?

I had a chance to do this in the spring of 1989, when one of my friends, who had left the 'liberal' FDP shortly before to join the Republikaner, addressed the Holocaust issue in one of our discussions. He recommended that I read the book Was ist Wahrheit, (What is Truth) by the socialist Frenchman, Professor Paul Rassinier.[30] This may be regarded as the first fully revisionist book ever published. It deals with the supposed extermination of the Jews from the point of view of a former member of the French Resistance who had been incarcerated by the Germans in several concentration camps during WWII.

The remarkable thing about the book is its author. Since he was interned in several concentration camps as a member of the Resistance and was a pronounced left-winger-before and after WWII, he was a French member of parliament for the leftist socialists-he could not be accused of wanting to whitewash anything or of having any kind of political agenda. Written in a factual and balanced style, the book was easy to read; we discussed it, and that was all. I felt no need to devote myself further to the subject, either through the examination of further revisionist or establishment literature or through undertaking my own investigations. If there had ever been a political reason for an involvement with Holocaust revisionism, it would have been when I was throwing myself intensively into debating on behalf of the Republikaner.

...a neutral Swiss...

The cause of my interest in the Holocaust problem, beginning in the fall of 1989, came from quite another source, one that was only secondarily political and which had nothing to do with the Republikaner. In the fall of 1989, I bought the book Der Nasenring. Im Dickicht der Vergangenheitsbewältigung (The Nose Ring-In the Thicket of Coming to Terms with the Past) by the Swiss political scientist Dr. Armin Mohler.[540] I had already received an earlier edition of this book as a gift from my mother in the mid-1980s. This earlier edition was the result of an assignment given to Mohler by a semi-official institute of West Germany. Mohler was asked to study how and when German attempts to come to terms with their past-originally a purely moral impetus-had become a weapon in day-to-day political discussion and intrigues.

That 'coming to terms with the past' could lend itself to misuse for dirty schemes is obvious. From my own experience, I can think of three notable cases, where prominent German figures were driven out of office and their reputation destroyed by political and media smear campaigns. In such cases, the media and/or competing colleagues either use (allegedly) 'brown spots' in the CV of the attacked individuals' WWII history, or they distort and/or instrumentalize 'politically incorrect' statements certain individuals made in public or private about Germany's WWII past.[541] Whatever the CV or the statements about the past of the victims of these campaigns are; the treatment which they receive by colleagues and the media must arouse the suspicion that the German past is being used today as a weapon of political intrigue against undesirables in one's own political party, in other parties, or in general against any unwelcome professional competitor.

The question of how true the historical picture is that hides behind the 'coming to terms with the past' Mohler handled only peripherally in this early edition of his book. His new book, which I read in the fall of 1989, goes into this question very thoroughly and thereby naturally brings up the question of the validity of historical revisionism-something which first became clear to me while reading the book.

That I got hold of this book was due not so much to its contents, which I previously knew nothing about, but more to my interest in the analyses of a Swiss political scientist, someone writing from what I considered to be a neutral position.

...and an apolitical American...

This Swiss author also reported about a study on the alleged 'gas chambers' at the Auschwitz concentration camp. This study, so Mohler, had been prepared by an American expert for execution technologies, who had come to the conclusion that there had never been any gassings with poison gas in Auschwitz. One of his main arguments was the absence of traces of the poison gas supposedly used in the walls of those locations identified as homicidal 'gas chambers'. Since this was a quite intriguing argument, I decided to order a copy of this study, for which Dr. Mohler even provided an address in his book. Thus were the factors brought together that I needed to compel me to get to the bottom of the problem: the report of an author I held to be politically neutral of a study by an apolitical non-partisan American on a discipline in which I had recently completed my diploma examination: Chemistry.

...enabled me to doubt

At that point, I was ready to put to the test my hitherto held opinion on the correctness of the established Holocaust dogma, because I had been presented with arguments from politically neutral persons that I could examine by means of my technical skill.

In late summer 1989, I received an English copy of the so-called Leuchter Report, which I have just mentioned, and I read and translated it into German immediately, but the report did not convince me entirely, because it was inexact at points and contained sloppy errors, as I described extensively in a letter to the editor published in the small right-wing monthly newspaper Junge Freiheit in 1990. But the Leuchter Report had embedded the thorn of doubt in my heart. I must now explain what that meant, since therein lies the real reason for my involvement.

Would only morons doubt?

It is generally known that none of the world's religions reproaches its adherents for doubting the faith. Religion teaches us that to doubt is human, and therefore acceptable. One who doubts is not guilty as a result.

After reading the Leuchter Report, I began to doubt whether the historically accepted view of the events of the Holocaust was correct. I nevertheless felt guilty, because in western societies we are imbued with our mother's milk that the history of the Holocaust is the purest truth, and those who doubt or deny this are evil or insane: extremists, National Socialists, Jew-haters, ethnic persecutors, weak-minded, morons, idiots, fruitcakes, cranks, crooks, anti-Semites, and so forth.

Yet, through a purely chemical argument, the thorn of doubt had been deeply embedded and I could only get rid of it by plucking it out or trying to forget it. I doubted, and felt guilty for doubting; yet I knew that it is not right to feel guilty for doubting.

From pole star to shooting star

Religions expect their adherents to believe in certain dogmas, but they do not demand doubters to feel guilty. At least the same must apply to science, where doubters should not be expected to feel guilty either. Here I was confronted with chemical-historical questions, and ideally speaking, science knows no dogmas, knows no compulsion to obedience, and no punishments for those who contradict the prevalent paradigm.

I therefore asked myself, why do western societies guard the Holocaust dogma closer than any religion does its own dogmas? The reason is certainly that western societies, and in particular German society, regards the Holocaust as one of their moral foundations. This I have explained elsewhere, in the book Dissecting the Holocaust.[542] The German elites almost uniformly maintain that the health and wealth of the German Republic depends on the observance of current description of the Holocaust. In the German Republic, we are raised with the conviction that the Holocaust is the moral pole star of our world-view, with respect to which everything else must be oriented.

That was my own unconscious belief until I began to question the standard historical version of the Holocaust. When these doubts surfaced, I was confronted with the possibility that the pole star might turn out to be only a meteor, that everything which had been held as fundamental truth may in reality be false.

Motivations

Here then are the reasons I have dedicated myself to revisionism:

Because of my upbringing, I felt bad merely for doubting. I knew something was wrong with a society when it instills guilt-feelings in its members simply because they dissent. The Holocaust is the one area, and almost the only area, where one is admonished to accept facts blindly; not to think critically. We are taught to question practically everything else, even that which is kept in high regard, such as the reality of God, or sexual intimacy. We are primed to be docile subjects and kept fearful of any transgressions with respect to the Holocaust. That angered me then and it angers me still.

Because of my doubts, my entire outlook on life became unstable. I was no longer certain what was correct or incorrect, who lied and who told the truth. The eternal conflict of good and evil was revived in me. The question where the truth could be found concerning the Holocaust was so important, that I knew I could only recover my peace of mind by finding out for myself, personally, where the truth lay. I wanted to rid myself of uncertainty one way or the other.

There is no scientific area in which those who hold dissident opinions are persecuted more mercilessly by the 'ruling order' than that of revisionism. That is probably why most people don't want to touch it, and most avoid it by convincing themselves that the subject is not relevant to current problems. But for me, this draconian persecution is the best proof there is that this is a crucial subject, because the powers that be regard it as most important that nobody touches this taboo. Comprehensive and critical research in this area is therefore very important for scientific, political and social reasons.[543]

The treatment of revisionism and its proponents in areas of science, journalism, politics and law is a scandal worldwide-it demands redress.

Almost stopped...

Up to the beginning of my PhD studies in the fall of 1990, I had read only two books on the subject: Wilhelm Stäglich's Der Auschwitz Mythos[41] and the book by Kogon and others entitled Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas.[42]

After reading these books I collected information on the so-called Zündel trial in order to find out what arguments had been made there. I had discovered in winter 1989/1990 that Zündel, who had commissioned the Leuchter Report, was an admirer of Adolf Hitler. This revelation had the equivalent effect of a kick in the stomach, because now I had to deal with the possibility that the Leuchter Report was not the independent report of an apolitical American technician, but merely the instrument of a German-Canadian Neo-Nazi. But such considerations could not remove the points made by Leuchter and therefore could not remove my doubts about the historical picture.

In other words, I fully realized that a fact-oriented argument remains a fact-oriented argument-and needs to be treated as such by the examining scientist-even if it came from somebody who stated them for political reasons.

...but then getting into gears

I began my own research into this area at the beginning of 1991, at first out of pure personal curiosity regarding the question whether the pigment Iron Blue that developed in the walls of the buildings, where gassings with hydrogen cyanide from Zyklon B allegedly had taken place, were sufficiently stable to still be there today. After that had been proved, I concentrated on the question if, when, how, and under what circumstances this pigment could develop in walls of different compositions.

A revisionist had read my letter to the editor of Junge Freiheit in 1990, mentioned above, and after a phone conversation, he sent me a list of addresses of persons and organizations-almost all of them unknown to me.

After I had sent out my first research results in spring 1991 to this list, I was contacted by one person on that list, a friend of ret. Major General Otto Ernst Remer, a retired Wehrmacht officer. At that time, Remer was engaged in publishing political pamphlets, some of which made quite blunt revisionist statements, which had led to several criminal prosecutions against him. Because of this, his friend and the Düsseldorf lawyer Hajo Herrmann, a well-known former Luftwaffe fighter pilot who was now Remer's defense attorney, were looking for an expert to support Remer's revisionist claims.

At that time, it even appeared to be possible for me to work jointly with the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History), an official German left-wing historical institute, whose address was on that list as well. However, they never responded to my letters, apparently because they were not interested in the technical-scientific side of the problem.

In summer 1991, I decided to leave the Republikaner party. I have already given the reasons for my decision. An additional and decisive motivation was that I did not want my involvement with revisionism to be interpreted politically because of my membership of a party or that my scientific activity in this controversial area would conflict with the political goals or principles of any party.

Sheer horror...

I should mention another reason that may be helpful toward understanding my involvement. Until my first trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau, I had had no exact idea of the condition of the camp's former crematoria, in which the alleged 'gas chambers' were located, so I had no idea whether it would actually be useful to undertake technical or chemical research. Before my first trip, I had thoroughly prepared myself as to what I might expect with respect to the material remains at, for example, 'gas chambers', if the generally accepted reports of the mass gassings in Birkenau were correct. It was clear to me, for example, if one was to believe the eye-witnesses, that the roofs of the morgues of crematoria II and III should show three or four holes through which Zyklon B was to have been thrown into the room.

On August 16, 1991, as I stood on the roof of morgue 1 of crematoria II at Birkenau, which was usually designated as the 'gas chamber' where the most mass-murders of the Third Reich were said to have taken place, a roof which was in various stages of collapse and yet still held together and partially rested on supporting columns; a roof in which I could find neither breath nor trace of these holes, so that I asked myself whether I lived in a world of madmen. I found myself horribly duped by a judiciary which had never thought it necessary to make any special technical examinations of the alleged crime scene. I had been lied to by all the politicians of the world who to date had failed to assemble even the most minuscule investigation commission. I had been deceived by the innumerable 'Holocaust historians' who to date had not deemed it necessary to make any investigation of the camps of Auschwitz or elsewhere, examinations which paleontologists and historians of antiquity have undertaken on the sites of ruins and other remains of ancient settlements. And I felt betrayed by the natural scientists and engineers world-over who swallowed any and every story whatsoever from the 'eye-witnesses' without so much as a murmur that the material remains, the supposed crime scenes, and the eye-witness testimony itself should be subjected to some rudimentary scrutiny.

...leads to the collapse of a world-view

On this 16th of August, 1991, my world-view collapsed and I swore to do whatever necessary to advance clarification to this complex of questions. I will only abandon my position when my doubts are confirmed or rejected through convincing scientific arguments in a fair scientific discourse. Use of force will never change this position. On the contrary: it fortifies my conviction that I am right, because only he who lacks arguments must use force. And since I have been chased all over the world ever since by all sorts of government with brute force, I now know that I must be right.

The Eros of Cognition

In time, a further motivation was added to those mentioned above, namely what I call the 'Eros of Cognition.' Whoever calls himself a scientist and has not experienced this, is not, in my opinion, a real scientist. The excitement of taking part in decisive scientific research and discoveries, to push things forward which one knows are new and even revolutionary, the consciousness of standing at the forefront and helping direct 'whither the ship of discovery goest'- those are things that one must know first-hand, in order to understand what is 'Eros of cognition'.

In February 1991, I attended a seminar in Bad Kissingen put on by a Sudeten-German youth organization-I was not a member but had been invited. Toward the end of the seminar, I got to know another participant of about my age. He suggested that before we departed we pay a visit to Wehrmacht Generalmajor Otto Ernst Remer, who lived in that town.

Remer, I was told, was the person who had suppressed the Putsch of July 20, 1944, against Hitler, and I was told he held fast to his views of that time. Our intended visit would be a little bit like a visit to a museum containing a living political fossil. I was curious, so I agreed and off we went.

To a young man from a bourgeois home who had been fed a steady diet of anti-fascism, the living room of General and Frau Remer was creepy-Hitler busts, military decorations and all kinds of propaganda hand-outs caused a shiver to run down my back. We were given a tour of the house by Frau Remer and then treated to a showing of a video-film that portrayed the events of July 20, 1944, from Remer's viewpoint. Thus 'enlightened', after an hour we left for home.[544]

Freedom to Witness

In summer 1991, when I was requested by Remer's attorney to prepare an expert opinion on the 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz for a criminal trial against his client, I well knew the client for whom I would be acting. It was clear to me that there was a danger that Remer's political opinions and activities could rub off on 'his expert witness', if the witness came to a 'politically incorrect' conclusion. Why I nevertheless decided to proceed is as follows.

In a state under the rule of law, a witness, including an expert witness, can not be punished for what he says before the court or for what he presents in writing to the court, in good conscience and to his best understanding.

Also, in civil law an expert witness is only liable if it can be proven that he violated the rules and accepted practices of his profession in producing his report and in so doing caused someone bodily or mental harm.

Therefore, when an expert witness through painstaking effort evaluates all available sources and interprets them in a technically sound manner, in good conscience and to his best understanding, then even if the conclusions of the expert report were wrong he could not be made liable for any gross negligence.

Consequently, he could defend himself at law against any civil disadvantages that resulted from the presentation of a possibly politically incorrect expert report because a witness-here an expert witness-may not be made to suffer for having testified in good conscience and to his best understanding.

Though I could see there were storms threatening to come my way, I looked on them placidly since I believed that having the law on my side gave me the upper hand.

May one publish expert opinions?

It was intended from the beginning that the expert report arising from this request of Remer's attorney would be published. It is unusual to publish expert reports from judicial proceedings, but it does happen when the subject is of public interest. Expert reports drawn up for several trials against supposed National Socialist war criminals, for example, were later made available to a wide public for educational purposes. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial is a prime example of this. The expert reports produced during this trial by scientists at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte were later published as a collection.[545]

My report was ready for publication in spring 1992. The original document prepared for the court was enlarged by numerous substantial additions and the layout was improved. In summer 1992, the German publishing houses Ullstein-Langen Müller and von Hase & Köhler showed active interest in the project. Dr. Fleißner, head of the Ullstein-Langen Müller publishers, quickly got cold feet due to the controversial nature of the theme, despite initial agreement, but von Hase & Köhler wasted no time presenting me with a signed contract. The problem with this contract was that it did not contain any specification as to when the book should appear. This meant publication could have been put off indefinitely while my hands were tied by my contractual agreement. When I pressed them to fix this they lost interest.

Waiting for the Doctor

Social and legal repression was a hint that the theme was a hot one, even when it was handled in a dry, scientific manner. On the advice of various people, I decided to postpone the publication of the document by a politically right-leaning publisher until after I had received my PhD degree.

In the European right-wing scene, the appearance of my report was awaited with increasing impatience throughout 1992; it was expected that my report would contribute decisively to a breakthrough of historical revisionism.

Various people began to prepare openly for the coming publication. I regarded these activities with mixed feelings and often needed to point out that my doctorate would not be properly completed until many months hence.

At the beginning of 1992, I reckoned that I could be in possession of the much-desired degree in the fall. Because of the workload of my doctoral supervisor Prof. von Schnering, however, I extended this period several times. I ended waiting five more months to February, 1993, until Prof. von Schnering began to proofread my dissertation.

Various Distributions Activities

I came into conflict with German-Canadian revisionist Ernst Zündel in this time, because in summer 1992, without my knowledge, he gave out copies of the report as prepared for the court in February, 1992. In November, again without my knowledge, he went so far as to translate this outdated version of my report into English. Later he let it be known that he would like to be reimbursed for his translation costs to the amount of $10,000.

I had a more pleasant experience with an attorney in Austria, Dr. Herbert Schaller. In February, 1993, he asked me if he could have 100 copies of the report to distribute discreetly in Austrian high society. Up to that point, I had made a total of 50 copies of the report by photocopier and glued in color photos by hand, which was an enormous labor. I told the attorney that since my doctoral supervisor had begun to work on my dissertation, I had no time to make 100 copies for him. However, I agreed that he could make copies from the copy he had and could distribute those-on the condition that he do so as discreetly as I myself had done already without accompanying commentary and without public propaganda.

As far as I know, Dr. Schaller did make and distribute 100 copies in February or March, 1993. To this day, there has been no public report of his action.

Remer Acts

As fate would have it, the Austrian attorney Dr. Schaller was also one of Otto Ernst Remer's defense attorneys. Remer must have heard about the distribution of my report in Austria. Shortly thereafter, I was informed by one of Remer's friends, and without Remer's knowledge, as I found out later, concerning Remer's intention to do in Germany what his lawyer had done in Austria. According to what I was told, Remer intended to do exactly as the Austrian had done. But because Germany is more than ten times larger than Austria, Remer and his friends intended to do their distribution activity more professionally by having my expert report printed instead of photocopied. Though I knew this could put my PhD degree in jeopardy, I saw no reason to intervene. Naively I thought that Remer would stick to the rules the Austrian had followed, which were perhaps too natural to me to be pointed out specifically: the report must remain unaltered, no additional text, no public propaganda is to be made. As we shall see, these rules were not considered natural by Remer and his friends.

The Bull in the China Shop

In March, 1993, with a furious publicity campaign, Remer announced as a measure of self-defense that he was going to publish and distribute that piece of exculpatory evidence that he was not permitted to present to the court, because the Holocaust is assumed to be self-evident.[546] Thereby Remer broke the first unconditional rule for the protection of my doctoral title, namely that there be no accompanying public propaganda. Thinking that this writing would only circulate in Remer's circle of supporters, I paid little attention. When I received a phone call from a journalist of a west German radio station, informing me that some of those advertising sheets had surfaced at the University of Cologne, the situation changed. Soon the management of the Fresenius Institute was on the telephone asking me what was in the report-the Fresenius Institute had analyzed the masonry samples from Auschwitz for me. They hinted that they might consider joining me in taking legal action against Remer. An hour later the Institute's attorney was threatening me with legal action. Remer had become a bull in the china shop.

Between a Rock and a Rock

My situation was precarious. At the request of an attorney, I had prepared an expert opinion to be used in the defense of his client. The conclusion of the report was potentially capable of reducing the culpability of said client with respect to the criminality of some of his factual assertions. I intended to publish the report a few months after completing my doctoral work anyway. Now the client took the step of publishing the report at a time that was uncomfortably early and, what was worse and unexpected, with an unhealthy press campaign. Should I now take him to court after having helped him in court? Should I take him to court for doing what I intended to do myself in a few months, though with a smaller or different press campaign?[547] After all, I had been informed in advance and did not intervene then. The only thing that had changed were Remer's public relation activities.

The Industrious Additions

As if Remer's industrious publicity campaign were not enough, in April 1993, as my expert report was handed out for the first time, I learned that a one-page foreword and a five-page appendix consisting of a description of Remer's criminal trial had been added to my report.[548] I was not the least bit interested in whether or not the added commentary was criminally relevant. I only glanced at the forward and took no notice of the trial description added after the end of my report. I was aggravated in that Remer had expanded and thus altered the text without authorization. Never mind what was in the commentary-it did not have my approval and that was aggravating enough. But now that this report of mine had been printed, what could I do about it? I thought that it was obvious that I could not be held responsible for something whose addition to my report I had had no knowledge of, not to mention that I had neither given my agreement to it nor had participated in its preparation. So why should I care whether the content of Remer's commentary was criminal? As a matter of fact, I basically ignored Remer's comments. So it happened that I perused Remer's commentary for the first time at the end of 1994, fully one and three quarters of a year afterward, after my own criminal indictment because of that commentary.

The Hot Potato

In any case, in early 1993, I was concerned only about my doctoral work. This also was due to a passage in Remer's appendix, which my doctoral supervisor held under my nose shortly after he-as all professors of chemistry in Germany-had received his copy. In the above-mentioned report on Remer's criminal trial, I had been mentioned in connection with the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart. Though I was preparing my PhD thesis in theoretical crystallography at this institute, my research about the 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz and my subsequent activities as an expert witness had nothing to do with this governmental research institute. It was my private activity. However, the fact that I was referred to in Remer's appendix as an "expert from the Max-Planck-Institute" had the consequence that the German news media and scientific, legal, and political circles unleashed a storm over the Max-Planck-Institute and demanded to have my head. At the insistence of the Institute, I consulted an attorney specializing in copyright law. He, however, made it clear to me that no 'serious' attorney would touch such a hot potato, both from conviction and for the sake of his reputation. Also, it was not clear whether I had any ground of action against Remer, since the copyright had probably gone to him because he had ordered and paid for the report as I had admitted.[549]

The question of the copyright to the report has never been cleared up. The Remers always held the position that they have the copyright to the report because they paid for it, and that they can do with it as they please. There was a contractual agreement set to paper, but unfortunately I lost my copy as a result of house searches and changes of abode, and the Remers could not find their copy after their flight to Spain, so that the actual contents of the document cannot be determined. I remember only that I was promised to be reimbursed for expenses that I incurred through the production of the report, and that in turn I was supposed to publish my expert report, but no time limit was given for that. The copyright was not discussed.

Also, the Remers have silently accepted that since June 1993, without consulting them, I have on my own determined where, when, and how my report is to appear in each of several languages-German, English, French and Dutch.

Thousands of Dollars-for Nothing

Left out in the rain, as it were, in mid-April 1993, I tried to divert Herr Remer. At the start of May, I finally succeeded in persuading him to curtail his distribution activities because of the reprisals I was experiencing.

Aside from any legal aspect of Remer's commentary, I would like to make a few observations. First, Remer's remarks were composed in a style that would insult any average anti-fascist citizen-and that would be about 95% of the population. One could well assume for that reason alone that most recipients of this version of the report would toss it into the wastebasket unread.

Not only that, but Remer had done something that would cause nearly all his recipients who possessed a spark of pride to consign the piece to the fire. In his foreword on the inside front cover, he attacked our leading politicians, media people, and jurists with the words, "These Liars need to be driven from their spoils fortresses".

At the same time, Remer sent this version of my report to exactly these leading politicians, media people, and jurists, and apparently believed he could achieve some success thereby. It is certain that to send a piece of writing to someone in which he is criticized and threatened is a useless exercise. Remer's defense action must have cost him thousands of Dollars-all for nothing.

In the Talons of Justice

After I had stopped Remer's defense action, the legal process ran its course. It was my thinking that no one could touch me for something I had not done. But the State's Attorney had to investigate, since many of those to whom Remer had sent his copies had filed criminal complaints against him and against me: the German Society of Chemists, many State Attorneys and Chief State Attorneys, Judges and Presidents of District Courts and Federal Courts, left-wing party representatives from various parliaments, professors of various disciplines from universities throughout Germany, and on and on and on. Not to mention that there were continual inquiries from Tel Aviv that persist even today.

Strangely, the State Attorneys were active only against me. They made inquiries about Remer, but saw no need to search his house. With respect to Remer, they were satisfied to push papers around. With respect to me, over the following years they searched my house three times and took away everything that was not nailed down. Apparently, German justice did not consider Remer to be dangerous. The Remer problem, they probably thought, would solve itself biologically. My case, however, they decided, needed extra effort.

The End of Illusions

The trial, which lasted from the end of 1994 to the middle of 1995, destroyed what remained of my illusions about the rule of law in Germany. I have described this in chapter 11.3. "Flaws of the State Under the Rule of Law".[550] On January 19, 1996, the Federal General State Attorney determined that I was to spend 14 months behind bars, not for my report but for Remer's commentary. The Federal Supreme Court concurred with this sentence in a decision on March 7, 1996 (Ref. 1 StR 18/96). On Remer's commentary, the District Court of Stuttgart stated in passing sentence (Ref. 17 KLs 83/94, S. 115):

"Although the foreword and afterward did not explicitly accuse the Jews of fabricating the descriptions of the Holocaust for political and material benefits, in the view of the court the Remer version of the Report had the purpose of suggesting this and thereby arousing hostility toward the Jews. This follows from the fact that the reader, believing the claims of the Report to be correct and influenced by the tendentious comments and rhetoric, would come to the conclusion that the surviving Jews as the most important witnesses of events, surviving relatives as directly affected and Jewish researchers must have intentionally concocted false reports on the Holocaust."

According to the court, then, Remer's remarks were not punishable by themselves; only together with my report a reader so inclined could 'read between the lines' and would supposedly be led to hostility toward the Jews, and that is morally indefensible because it must be clear to everyone that one ought to be 'a friend of the Jews'.

Therefore, not only was I punished for a crime I had not committed, but for one which no one had committed.

This would have made some sense, at least, if Remer had foregone his commentary and I had been sentenced for my report and not for somebody else's commentary, but that was not the case.

In Exile

On May 7, 1996, the criminal trial against me and others for the publication of the book Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte[551] (for this, see chapter 11.4.2.) began before the County Court of Tübingen. The sentence that could be imposed by such a court was one to four years imprisonment. Since I had already been sentenced to 14 months of imprisonment without probation, the sentence for me this time would probably not be less than two years-also without probation. Also, the public prosecutor of Tübingen was answerable to the General Prosecutor's Office in Stuttgart, and who knows to whom they are answerable. From the beginning, the following dicta overshadowed the trial:

"All democracies have a basis, a cornerstone. For France it is 1789, for Germany it is Auschwitz."[553]

In its sentence, the Tübingen County Court decided the book Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte should be withdrawn from circulation, effectively annihilated and that the author and publisher should be punished. This, after prominent German historians had submitted to the court expert opinions to the effect that the book held to scientific standards and that therefore the authors, editor, publisher, sellers, printer and purchasers were owed the right of freedom of science and the right of freedom of expression (see chapter 11.4.2.).[554] It did not help:

"The Non-Jew Must Burn!"

Since I was the editor of the book, Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte, a warrant for my arrest was issued and I fled the country. In view of all this I hope one may forgive and understand my reasons that I took my family and went into exile. A busy young father had better things to do than breathe jail-house air.[555]

Hindsight is Insight

Today, nine years after these events, I know that it is precisely the serious, scientific revisionist work that the establishment considers threatening, since one cannot fight a professionally written work with cat-calls and jeers. Unlike shallow pamphlets, it must be taken seriously. Patrick Bahners stated the establishment view in the highly respected German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:[556]

"The state protects the freedom of science. It recognizes the scientist not by the result, but by correct form. [...] But it can be seen that the intention to agitate can be recognized not only by errors of form that separate beer hall talk from scientific undertaking. On the contrary agitation that is perfect in form is the most perfidious. [...] But for those who survived Auschwitz it can hardly be a slighting insult when an expert using phony reasoning tells him there never was a mortal danger.

Also the state is mocked here. If Deckert's [a German revisionist] 'Views about the Holocaust' were correct, the Federal Republic was founded on a lie. Every Presidential address, every minute of silence, every history book would be a lie. When he denies the murder of Jews, he repudiates the legitimacy of the Federal Republic."

However, Bahners proceeds from false premises.

First, Bahners does not make clear how an intention to agitate can be recognized, if not by errors of form. It is stated in the German constitution that science is free without restriction. Decisions of the German Federal Constitutional Court have stated that science is defined by formal rules alone and not by content. These decisions are in agreement with fundamental theoretical works on the nature of scientific knowledge. If Bahners thinks differently, he is anti-constitutional, anti-scientific, and anti-human rights.

Secondly, there are no experts who assert that the survivors of Auschwitz were "never in mortal danger". Bahners warms up the calculated lie that revisionists would present Auschwitz as a vacation resort without danger to life or limb and generally characterize the National Socialist persecution of the Jews as harmless to the Jews. Either Bahners doesn't know what he's talking about-in which case he should stay away from the keyboard-or he himself is agitating against others with different opinions, in which case the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung should not allow Bahners to soil its reputation.

Thirdly, Bahners' conception that the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany is based on the unconditional recognition of the established version of the National Socialist persecution and extermination of the Jews is absurd and utterly false. If the Federal Republic of Germany were actually founded on this historical detail, it would be a dire weakness, because every state that bases its existence on a version of history enforced under pains and penalties must sooner or later come to grief.

Certainly, the formal foundations of the legitimacy of the German Republic are very different-human rights, civil right, acceptance by the people of the state, international recognition, political, historical and cultural identity and continuity with preceding German states-and there is no need to accept the harsh judgment of Bahners and some of his colleagues.

Pseudo-legal Contortions

However, it was recently made clear by the Ministry of Justice of Baden-Württemberg that in future, Germany's judicial system will adopt Bahners' viewpoint that revisionist works of a scientific nature constitute incitement to hatred and must therefore be burned. In its answer to a question relating to the seizure of scientific revisionist books of Grabert Verlag it stated:[557]

"Legal intervention is not constitutionally excluded even when it is clear that the case involves a work of science or research. Article 5, Para. 3, Cl. 1 of the Fundamental Law contains no expressed prohibition of limits. In constitutional law it is recognized that even freedoms that are granted without expressed conditions have limits. Such limits might come from the fundamental rights of third parties or from other constitutionally-protected goods. In these cases there must be a comparison of the competing claims of the equally constitutionally-protected interests with the purpose of optimizing these claims. There must be a particular examination of the case making use of the method of proportionality. (Decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfGE) 67, 213, 228; 77, 240, 253; 81, 278, 292ff.; 83, 130, 143) When these constitutional requirements are met, in special cases use of appropriate measures is consistent with freedom of science or of research"

The assertion of the Minister of Justice that even a scientific work can be seized when the fundamental rights of others are involved is completely false, and the decisions of the German Federal Constitutional Court cited here are misleading. It is true that no fundamental right can be guaranteed unconditionally and when there is a conflict with other fundamental rights that an optimal compromise of interests must be found by means of the principle of proportionality. However, this limitation of fundamental rights pertaining to the freedom of science can never extend to the determination of what theses may be studied and to which conclusions one may come.

Only the means by which research is conducted is subject to limitations, since research may not employ methods that compromise the rights of others-such as experiments on humans or endangering the environment. If it is forbidden to science to formulate new theses or to attempt to refute existing theories, however controversial these attempts and their conclusions might be, or if it is forbidden to science to use certain arguments or to come to certain conclusions, or to publish scientific conclusions in order to subject them to indispensable public scrutiny and scientific criticism, then one throws the fundamental right to freedom of scientific research out the window entirely, because the critical examination of standing theories and paradigms through serious attempts to refute them, and the publication thereof, is the heart of science, or even of human knowledge in general.[558]

The Consequences

The declaration of the Ministry of Justice given above is clearly unconstitutional and one may hope that the German Federal Constitutional Court will say so at some point in the case of Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte. Of course, it is not likely to do so under present conditions, since in a similar case of Federal book-burning in the early 1980s, the German Federal Constitutional Court itself made a statement in the sense of the Ministry of Justice's statement above.[559]

Therefore one cannot avoid the conclusion that the present situation in Germany is as follows:

With respect to the core of the Holocaust claim-gas chambers, the National Socialist's intention to annihilate the Jews, and the carrying out such a program-there can be only one predetermined conclusion under penalty of law.

The most important condition to the free pursuit of science would then be suspended, that which states: Every thesis must be subjected to the strictest attempts at refutation and must be refutable in theory and in practice. Neither may any conclusion of scientific research be prescribed nor proscribed (cf. Article 3(3) of German Basic Law).

The fundamental dignity of humans that sets us apart from animals lies in the fact that we do not take our sensual impressions as being identical to objective reality, but that we doubt and can resolve our doubts through intellectual activity-research. This factor of human dignity is suspended in Germany in this particular field. (cf. Article 1, of German Basic Law).

It remains an open question what one is to do with Article 20(4) of the German Basic Law which states:

"All Germans have the right of resistance to anyone who attempts to overthrow this provision if no other means avail."

Where politics and the Zeitgeist exert heavy pressure on justice, one must expect that unjust judgments will be handed down on purpose. For this there is no need either for a state with a constitution which is openly contrary to the rule of law or a condition similar to civil war. With respect to normal prosecutions of criminals, the legal procedures of nations observing the rule of law and those not observing the rule of law are similar. Only in politically motivated prosecutions will it show whether or not judges follow the rule of law, that is, whether they can be forced by trial procedures not to deviate from them. For some time there has been a discussion as to how far the character of the Federal Republic of Germany as a nation observing the rule of law has been endangered by certain phenomena of the Zeitgeist.

One case in particular caused severe accusations from many sides of the German society so that the political distortions within the German legal system have indeed reached such a degree that even legal experts are seriously troubled: In 1991, Günter Deckert, then leader of the German nationalistic party NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands), organized a convention where Fred. A. Leuchter, a U.S. expert for execution technologies, lectured about his technical and chemical research regarding the alleged 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz. Deckert translated his speech for the audience into German. He was subsequently prosecuted for this and eventually sentenced to 12 months on probation. Following a huge media-outcry and massive intervention of national as well as international politicians, Deckert was put on trial again-at a different court with different judges-and sentenced to two years without probation. His first judge Dr. Rainer Orlet was threatened to be prosecuted for violating the law-his sentence was considered to have been too mild-but was eventually only forced to retire.[560] Deckert's publication about this affair,[561] together with other 'thought' crimes like writing naughty letters to Jewish representatives and selling prohibited revisionist literature-were prosecuted as well and, together with his first conviction, led to an accumulated prison term of more than five years. Eventually, even his defense lawyer Ludwig Bock was prosecuted and sentenced for too vigorously defending Deckert by asking for permission to introduce revisionist evidence. This was considered criminal behavior because Bock allegedly indicated with this that he identifies himself with revisionist thoughts.[562] In a similar case, the well-know German right-wing defense lawyer Jürgen Rieger was put on trial in 2000, because during the proceedings against one of his clients in summer 1996, he had filed a motion to introduce me as an expert witness as evidence for the fact that his client's revisionist claims were well founded. Though Jürgen Rieger was initially acquitted by the Hamburg District Court,[563] the German Federal Supreme Court subsequently overturned this verdict, demanding the sentencing and punishment of every lawyer who dares to ask for, or introduce, evidence challenging the common 'knowledge' about the Holocaust.[564] Thus, it is clear that every judge, who dares to hand out lenient sentences to revisionist, at least risks an abrupt end of his career, and defense lawyers trying to defend their clients effectively may themselves be prosecuted for that.

In what follows, I shall show by my own experience which indicates that the rule of law in the German state has many flaws that make it easy for the judicial system in general and the judges in particular to deliberately make bad decisions uncorrectable, because they have the appearance of being decided according to the rule of law.

Again and again in various sorts of company I encounter the same disbelieving astonishment as to the state of the German criminal justice system that overcame me at the beginning of the prosecution avalanche against me. Despite my lack of legal qualification I believe I have been called upon to raise my voice on this subject, since the numerous formal defects of the German legal system have apparently not been dealt with by those with the professional competence to do so.

Since I am no legal expert but only one who has been self-educated on the subject through painful experience, I hope readers will excuse my ineptness of expression. If I make frequent reference here to my trial before the District Court of Stuttgart (ref. 17 KLs 83/94), it is because these examples serve to indicate major problems in the German system of government and its judicial system.

No Word-For-Word Record

Until the end 70s, a record of the proceedings was kept during German criminal trials, in which the statements of witnesses and responses of the accused were set down. The contents of this record were never relevant for an appeal or revision. For example, if in the record it said 'The witness said A', but in the decision the court stated 'The witness said B', the assertion in the decision would be taken as the fact and that in the record would be considered meaningless.

In the course of a change in the German criminal law at the end of the 70s, the duty to make entries in the record of the proceedings was removed for reasons of economy for all courts higher than the County Courts. What appears now in German trial records is something like 'The witness made statements on the subject' or 'The accused made a declaration'. The substance of what was said cannot be found there and it can no longer be proven by documentation when the court uses statements incorrectly.[565]

In other nations observing the rule of law, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, or Austria, word-by-word transcripts of the proceedings are prepared.

The anti-justice consequences of the present German system can easily be imagined, and I will briefly illustrate it with three examples from my own trial.

1. The issue in this trial was whether or not I had participated in the distribution of a version of my expert report with added commentary by Generalmajor O.E. Remer in April 1993. The court was interested in, among other things, how Remer had come into possession of that particular version of my report which he used for producing his printed version. In the trial I had stated that Remer had probably received it from his attorney Hajo Herrmann. The court was more than eager to nail me as a liar, so they were trying to make Hajo Herrmann concede that he never sent a copy of this particular version to his client. Remer had reproduced the "second version of the 3rd edition" of my report, which the court called version "F2".[566] In the trial report made by an observer, the questioning of Herrmann on December 6, 1994, ran somewhat as follows:

"Then the witness Hajo Herrmann, year-of-birth 1913, was questioned. He confirmed that in the summer of 1991 he had assigned the preparation of the expert report to the defendant (Germar Rudolf). The witness states that he had received every version of the expert report from the defendant and had sent a copy of each to his client Remer. Later the witness stated that he did not know whether he had received another expert report in November or December 1992. When the judge inquired about it further he said that he could almost exclude this. He also did not believe that he had provided Remer with a new version of the expert report during the appeal to the Federal Supreme Court. Later, Herrmann said that the first version of the 3rd edition sent in November 1992 was the last that he had received. When the defendant (Germar Rudolf) interrogated Herrmann (which the judge at first objected to) whether the witness thought that the arrangement of the chapters of the first version of the 3rd edition was correct, the witness remembered that he had requested a change by telephone. At that point the witness decided that he must have received the second version of the 3rd edition that had been changed due to his request [this was the version called "F2" by the court, which Remer used to produce his published version]. Herrmann could also not exclude that Remer might have obtained documentation with new versions of the expert report during the appeal to the Federal Supreme Court. He said he had submitted the expert report both during the appeal to the District Court and during the appeal to the Federal Supreme Court. At this moment, the Presiding Judge interjected that the expert report was not to be found in the records of either of these proceedings. Made aware of the error of his statement, the witness said that due to the voluminous material in the numerous trials in which he was involved he was not able to pay such particular attention to any one document, hence he could not remember every single one. In the course of time he had been involved in 12 to 15 trials in which he used Rudolf's expert report, in addition to all his other trials. For him, the witness, the expert report of the accused was just one document among many others and so he was not able to remember details."

What can be seen from this is that the witness Herrmann was basically confused and could not remember details about which version he had sent to whom and when. But at least Herrmann remembered clearly that he had requested changes to the expert report, so he concluded logically that I must have sent him copies of this rearranged version; after all, I had prepared this version on his request. The court, however, described the statements of the witness on page 199 as follows:

"The taking of evidence has shown on the other hand that attorney Herrmann never, and in any case not during 1992 nor in the first quarter of 1993, had come into possession of draft 'F2' and that he did not send it to Remer. The witness Herrmann affirmed that the draft 'F1' was the last version of the 'expert report' that had come to him, and in addition he could not say when he came into possession of this version. In the rest, he believably reported that he had had no further contact with Remer after the trial in Schweinfurt on Oct. 22, 1992, due to the 'expert report'. He could not remember having sent a copy of the 'expert report' to Remer in December 1992."

The difference between the two texts is obvious: The independent observer reported that Herrmann did revise his initial statement after I made him remember that it was Herrmann himself who made me prepare this particular version "F2", which leads to the logical conclusion that he did, of course, receive at least one copy of this version he had specifically demanded. But the court simply 'forgot' about this detail. From its own faulty reasoning, the court concluded on page 202f.:

"The fact that the accused knowingly spread an untrue account of how the Remer operation came about is a particularly clear indication that he was involved in the Remer operation."

2. The Court was also eager to try to prove that I did tell my sister about Remer's commentary before Remer had even started to distribute my report, which would have been possible only if I had been involved in the production of said commentary. The first copies of my report mailed out by Remer arrived at their destinations briefly after Easter 1993. Did I tell my sister already before Easter about these comments, then this would put a 'nail into my coffin'. According to the above-mentioned independent observer, the sister of the accused made the following statement on January 24, 1995:

"The sister of the accused states that she learned from her brother during a visit shortly before Easter 1993 (April 10-12, 1993), that Remer had joined a racist and anti-Semitic commentary to the expert report, which he had obtained from his attorney, and distributed it against his will. In this connection there was talk [between my sister and me] of a measure against Remer at one time. The inquiry, whether her brother described the Remer operation as a threatening event or as a completed happening, she could not answer because she could not remember. It was possible that the operation had already happened. Actually she had spoken with her brother on this subject numerous times since there had been telephone communications between them once a fortnight. Under intensive questioning by the court about details of content and chronology of the events at that time, the witness appeared stressed and appreciably abashed. On inquiry of her brother she said she could no longer remember exactly when she had heard what news from her brother on this subject. She could only describe her overall impression."

The court described this witness statement as follows (p. 210):

"Moreover the sister of the accused said he had expressed to her already in Easter 1993 (April 11/12, 1993) the intention to follow the Remer version with an 'authorized' version. The reason he had given was that Remer had scattered racist expressions through the 'expert report'. But in his testimony the accused says he saw the Remer version first from his doctoral supervisor on 16th April 1993 and first knew of the Remer additions at that time. The fact that he referred to Remer's 'racist expressions' previous to this is a further indication that the accused had knowledge of the Remer operation beforehand."

However, according to the independent observer, my sister thought "it was possible" that Remer's mailout had already taken place before Easter 1993, which is clearly incorrect-all copies of Remer's version were mailed to their recipients only after April 15, 1993. This proves that my sister's memory was wrong regarding the chronology, which is also supported by her own statements under intensive inquiry both by the judges and by me that she simply could not remember when she had heard what from me. The fact that the witness could no longer remember the exact chronology was duly omitted by the court for obvious reasons. Who of us can remember, down to the exact day, what we heard from our siblings two years ago? But for the court, this was a major stepping stone to its verdict.

3. Another way to prove me a liar was the court's attempt to prove that my statements regarding contacts with the Remer couple were a lie. By showing that I was hiding my contacts to Remers, they sought to prove that I was in fact involved in their plot to hide the truth from the court. On my contacts with O.E. Remer, the independent observer wrote the following on the trial day November 11, 1994:

"At that point he [the accused] mentioned among other things his four meetings with O. E. Remer, of which the last took place at the beginning of May 1993. At this time, he had negotiated a declaration of injunction with Remer through an intermediary. The intermediary had rephrased it and given it to him, the accused. Shortly thereafter, Remer had signed it in the presence of the intermediary and himself. When asked, why he had not handled the declaration of injunction himself, the accused explained he had not had any contact with Remer and did not desire to do so."

For January 24, 1995, one reads there:

"Next was introduced an application form to participate at a revisionist gathering in Roding in summer 1991, organized by O. E. Remer, which had been filled out by the accused but not sent in. The accused said he had been interested in the proceedings because of the announced participants Prof. R. Faurisson and Dr. W. Stäglich. In any case, he was not there, which is also proved by the fact that he had not sent in the application form. He had not noticed at the time that Remer directed the proceedings.

The defense attorney said that he had himself participated in this gathering but could not remember that he had seen his present client there."

But the court portrayed both happenings, which it interpreted as evidence of my lack of credibility, as follows (p. 148ff.):

"For one thing he [the accused] took part in the closed revisionist proceedings called by Remer on 29.6.1991 [in Roding], in which Remer gave the welcoming address (p. 49). The copy of the filled out application form that was found at his house shows that. The accused has not contested this. [...]

In addition, he finally admitted to have stopped by Remer's place in Bad Kissingen on May 2, 1993, together with Philipp in connection with the completion of the declaration of injunction (p. 124). The accused at first attempted to disguise this contact. In his first response during the trial, when talking about how this declaration evolved, he said he had communicated with Remer 'through an intermediary' after the latter had not responded to his written warnings. This intermediary had worked out the text of the declaration with Remer and had given it to him. As reason for having made use of an intermediary he said he did not want to have direct contact with Remer.

The accused attempted to deliberately misrepresent his attitude to Remer in other cases as well. The above-mentioned letter of the accused to attorney Herrmann on Dec. 20, 1993, shows this. [...] At the same time the accused described [in this letter] the supposedly only three meetings with Remer. [...]

It is noteworthy that his letter to attorney Herrmann deliberately describes his relation to Remer incompletely by leaving out both of these events [revisionist gathering in Roding and arranging publication of the brochure Die Zeit lügt!,[567]. The chamber is convinced from this that it does not reflect the true relations and the actual opinion of the accused on Remer, but was written expressly for the purpose of misleading the investigation process."

Since the original of the application form to the revisionist gathering in Roding had been introduced as evidence during the trial and not a copy, as the court falsely claims in its written verdict, it is easy to see that I was not present at the gathering in Roding. In a later publication, my defense lawyer confirmed the report of the independent observer and criticized the court harshly for this rather odd mistake.[568] One can see even further that the report of the independent observer is correct with respect to my responses. If one considers that Remer was absolutely not involved in arranging the publication of the brochure Die Zeit lügt!, i.e., that it did not lead to any correspondence or meetings between Remer and me (not even the Court claimed that), that it was not me who decided to put Remer's name and publishing house on the imprint of the brochure,[569] and that in the letters and statements quoted by the Court I was always writing and speaking about actual dealings with Remer-there was none in connection with the brochure Die Zeit lügt!-it must be asked: who lacks credibility here?

A large number of similar cases could be shown in which the court made observations on the statements of mine or of witnesses that differ from the trial report. Since the differing interpretation of the court were always disadvantageous for me, the question must be raised whether we are supposed to believe that these errors were made unintentionally.

Hiding the Purpose of Evidence

It appears possible that in German courts, the written judgment will suddenly present evidence as the main proof of guilt which had remained in the background during the proceedings of the trial, in that the court reinterprets it in a way that had not been mentioned during the proceedings. In this way, it is impossible for the defense to bring in evidence to refute evidence which at first appears to be harmless since no one can tell what evidence the court will use as proof of what fact.

When the defense attorney wants to introduce a piece of evidence, he must always provide a reason for it so that the court can decide on the request. On the other hand, this rule does not seem to apply to the court itself.

Here is one example of that. The court interpreted certain publication details of the original version of the Rudolf expert report used by Remer in his version as well as of the version without comments published by me a few months later as proof that Remer's distribution activities of his version and the subsequent publication of my authorized version were one single operation planned in advance. As one of the main proofs for this the court pointed to the fact that in the draft of my expert report produced in November 1992 (version F2), Prof. R. Faurisson had not been mentioned in the acknowledgements at the end of the report. He had first been expressly thanked in the authorized version of my expert report published in July 1993 on the inner cover. According to the Court, this allegedly proves that the authorized version was planned already in November 1992 (decision, pp. 93, 208ff. Don't try to find logic in it. There is none.). It did not enter the judges' minds that I had deleted the acknowledgement to Faurisson from the November 1992 version simply because I feared to be rejected as an expert witness, should any court recognize that I had been in contact and on good terms with the world's leading revisionist, and not because I already planned to thank Faurisson later in a prominent place in the authorized version. The whole argument spun around this point about the acknowledgement, which first surfaced in the decision and was based on different versions of the expert report that had been introduced as evidence, had never been mentioned even peripherally in the 29 days of the trial proceedings, so that the defense was unable to bring in any evidence to counter this supposed evidence proving the guilt of the accused.

Introduction of Evidence After the Verbal Decision

It is doubtful whether the introduction of evidence following the trial is admissible. Nevertheless, the District Court of Stuttgart used exactly this method in order to portray me as untrustworthy. As supposed proof that I had manipulated witnesses, on page 170f. of its decision the court stated:

"Further, during a search of his living quarters on March 27, 1995, which took place in the context of an investigation conducted by the State Attorney of Tübingen on the book "Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte", another computer belonging to the accused was found on which there was an answer list that concerned the interrogation of the witness Dill by the court, as the accused himself declared in the trial."

First, the description of the court is misleading, since I had only declared that my computer had been seized, but not that an answer list had been found on it. This document had been mentioned by the court in the trial but it had not been introduced as evidence in the trial. For this reason, the defense attorney did not think it necessary to produce evidence to oppose this imputation, which might have explained that the item was not an answer list intended for use in an upcoming questioning of a witness. In fact, it was a detailed record I had prepared about what Dill was asked and what he answered when he appeared for the first time in front of the court, and this list was prepared after this interrogation, hence could not be used to manipulate this witness at all.

Refusal of Foreign Witnesses Without Reason

In the middle of the 1980s, the German criminal justice system was altered so that motions could effectively be denied to hear the testimony of foreign witnesses in their own country. In the course of the trial concerning Remer's distribution of my report, it became obvious that several foreign revisionists had participated in the operation indirectly or directly. Since these revisionists faced the possibility of arrest if they traveled to Germany, due to their revisionist activity, they would have had to give their testimony outside the country. Because of the reformulation of the German law, however, it was possible for the court in the final phase of the trial to deny numerous motions of the defense that were intended to hear the testimony of foreign witnesses outside the country on key questions. The effect this can have on the judgment is obvious.

Prevention of Appeal

In criminal proceedings caused by crimes that are considered by the German authorities to have caused major violations of law and order, the trial is held immediately on the District Court level, i.e., on what normally is supposed to be the appeal level (the first level is the County Court). In such cases, the accused has only one trial during which evidence can be presented, that is, there is no appeal possible to the verdict of this court! Only a so-called application for a revision of the verdict with the German Federal Supreme Court is possible, but such an application can only criticize errors of form (matters of law). The factual assertions of the deciding court, i.e., description and evaluation of evidence (matters of fact), will not be discussed anymore. Furthermore, it is usually the case that applications for a revision will be denied by the German Federal Supreme Court, if the defense is the only party to request it.

Whoever determines, and on whatever basis, whether or not law and order have been seriously violated by an offender, must remain open. But such a serious violation seems to be always given, if the offence massively attacked political taboos. In such cases-where the accused's entire existence is at stake-he has no possibility of reopening the taking of evidence in an appeal.

The fact that recent attempts were made in Germany to deny an appeal even for trials of minor misdemeanors held before County Courts for the sake of relieving the workload of the court, shows how little room for maneuver is left to him who gets caught up in the wheels of justice.

The Arbitrary Evaluation of Evidence

Even if a court has introduced evidence in the course of a trial that made its delicately constructed bridge of circumstantial evidence to collapse by refuting it, this is no reason not to impose a sentence. Here is an example.

In my case, the court had come up with the idea that, already in October 1992, I had planned Remer's distribution activities of his version and the subsequent publication of my authorized version as one single operation planned in advance (decision pp. 207ff.).

At the same time, on Feb. 16, 1995, the court introduced a letter of mine to Mark Weber, dated May 22, 1993, from which it was clear that up to the end of May 1993, a month after the end of Remer's distribution operation, I still did not know where I could publish my authorized version of the expert report, which indisputably contradicted the court's thesis that I was already planning to publish the authorized version at the same time as I was allegedly helping to plan the Remer operation.

Here is a discussion of a second example of the court's logic-free evaluation of the evidence. In its written verdict, the court conceded that I intended to get the attention of the lay public for my expert report (decision pp. 23f., 108f., 210), so that I had paid attention that there was no reason for the general public to suspect any lack of technical merit and reputation, e.g., by including political comments (decision pp. 17ff., 196f., 218). This was supported by the evidence as a whole and in particular by the documents introduced on June 13, 1995, which was a series of letters that I wrote to various persons between 1991 and 1993, all clearly stating that I did not want any political or polemic comments included in or associated with my expert report. However, if one was to follow this logic, one has to assume that I would have sent out-or agreed to the distribution of-a version of my expert report which confined itself to technical discussion but would never have sent out one such as the Remer version with its polemical/political commentary. In the decision the court can escape this logical contradiction only by claiming that I had miscalculated the effect of Remer's commentary (p. 228).

Incriminating Mitigating Evidence

Having arrived at a verdict in this way, the tens of pieces of exonerating evidence-documents and witnesses-that my lawyer had introduced served the court as evidence of my "criminal energy", since, according to the court, this exonerating evidence was all partly made up (decision pp. 13, 22, 65, 118-126, 131, 175, 192) and served only to deceive the court:

"The culpability of the accused is even greater when one takes note of the high criminal energy with which the crime was committed. The accused acted on the basis of a calculated and highly refined strategy carried out in a hidden manner that was chosen beforehand with great deliberation, involved numerous deceits and manipulations and was therefore very difficult to penetrate." (decision p. 237)

Which leads to the Court's conclusion:

"The sentence of imprisonment is not subject to probation, by sec. 56 of the Criminal Code (StGB)." (decision p. 238)

since:

"On the contrary, [the crime of the accused] as described, because of the calculated and refined and clandestine manner in which it was carried out, should be seen as particularly grave." (decision p. 240)

Conclusions

Given the present circumstances of the criminal justice system in the Federal Republic of Germany, when a judge or a panel of judges intend to render an unjust verdict, they will have no difficulty in doing so as long as they are assured there is no organized public resistance from the media, academia, the police, or the churches.

The statements of witnesses and accused may be manipulated at will. Evidence may be interpreted any which way in the decision or may be brought in after the process is over. Submitted evidence may be passed over without mention and use of foreign witnesses may be denied arbitrarily.

Exculpatory evidence may be discredited as a deceptive maneuver of the accused and serve as evidence that the accused is particularly deserving of punishment. A second trial instance to try to correct these measures can be denied in case of public necessity. The evaluation of evidence is bound neither by the evidence introduced nor by logic.

The question, how these conditions can be overcome so that further misuse can be reduced as much as possible, needs to be answered by honest jurists and politicians.

Closing Remarks

The court based its refusal to allow for a probation of the sentence of imprisonment not only on my supposedly high "criminal energy," but also on the fact that I did not seem to have a favorable social prognosis, since I had not only not repudiated my revisionist views, but defended them even more vehemently and kept propagandizing them. As proof for this the court pointed to the book Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte,[570] edited by me under a pen name, which had come onto the market just at the beginning of this trial, as well as to the almost-complete book Auschwitz: Nackte Fakten[571] found on my computer during a house search conducted in March 1995, i.e., right in the middle of the ongoing proceedings.

With this, a fact was used to harden my punishment that had not even been determined to be a criminal offense in a legally binding decision by a German court in the first place, as was a work which had not yet been published and which therefore could not even theoretically have been a crime. By German law, it is admissible for a German criminal court to take account of the opinions of the accused-here my historical revisionist opinions-in the weighing of punishment. Through this back-door, the trial against me was turned into a political trial.[572]

Reprinted below is the commentary of retired Major General Otto Ernst Remer, which he included in his version of the Rudolf expert report, as it was printed on pages 109a to 114 of the court decision against Germar Rudolf.[573] After reading this chapter 11 so far, readers should be in a position to judge whether this commentary was sufficient cause to sentence expert witness Germar Rudolf to 14 months' loss of freedom, had he been the author of the commentary, which he was not, though the Great State Security Chamber of the District Court of Stuttgart disregarded the evidence and said he was the author.

On Jan. 19, 1996, the German Attorney General demanded that Germar Rudolf should spend 14 months behind bars for nothing other than this commentary. The German Federal Supreme Court concurred with this demand in a decision on March 7, 1996 (ref.: 1 StR 18/96).

In addition to these judicial issues, there were other problems with Remer's commentary. In his preface printed on the inside front cover, under the caption "To all friends, countrymen ..." he attacked our leading politicians, media people and jurists harshly with the words, "These liars need to be driven from their spoils fortresses". At the same time, Remer mailed this version to exactly these leading politicians, media people and jurists. It is certain that to send such a piece of writing to these leading politicians, media people and jurists was entirely useless-though it must have cost many thousand DM.

Remer attached a comprehensive five-page article on the October 1992 trial, in which Remer himself had been sentenced to a 22 months prison term for denying the Holocaust and other things. This article was written by a close friend of Remer who had attended Remer's trial. It basically summarizes the major events of this trials, like a description of various pieces of evidence presented by the two defense lawyers, their rejection by the court, and the final pleadings of the public prosecutor and Remer's defence attorneys. The Rudolf Report had been prepared for this and for other trials.

In the trial against expert witness Rudolf, the District Court of Stuttgart took exception against this article, which had been entitled "Justice in Germany 1992". For example, they criticized that the quotation from the Foreign Office saying that it was known that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz (p. I) was incomplete, as the ellipses showed. The quoted German official Dr. Scheel had stated later in his letter that the gas chambers had been located in the Birkenau camp which was 3 km to the west. Thus he had not denied the existence of gas chambers in the complex Auschwitz-Birkenau, as the quotation suggested, but only with respect the main camp Auschwitz. This determination of the court is correct and demonstrates that Remer's friend misconstrued documents to mislead the public. However, it should be pointed out that the statement of the Foreign Office that there had been no gas chambers in Auschwitz contradicts many witnesses, such as Pery S. Broad or Rudolf Höß. If these witnesses were wrong with their statements about the main camp Auschwitz, how can we be certain that other witnesses to other camps were not just as wrong? How can it be that under such circumstances to doubt the existence of gas chambers in other camps, or even to dispute their existence, is a criminal offense?

The District Court of Stuttgart also commented that the "Comparison of official figures on the number of those killed in the gas chambers in Auschwitz" (p. II) was insulting and constituted incitement to racial hatred. But in the meantime, quite official and well reputed sources have added even lower figures to this list of massively differing numbers: in 1993 and 1994, the French pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac claims between 630,000 and 470,000 'gas chamber' victims, and in 2002, a German mainstream journalist reduced the death toll of the Auschwitz 'gas chambers' down to as little as 356,000.[574] One could certainly agree to the view that any number of victims which is too high or too low can have an insulting effect on some people or can incite to hatred against others. However, it was not Remer who had put these widely differing figures into the world, among which only one can be correct at best-and all others potentially inciting to racial hatred.

Also, Remer's statement that the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial had determined that there were only 45,510 deaths in the gas chambers was not strictly true. In 1965, the Frankfurt Jury Court had sentenced some of the former camp staff on grounds of murder of a certain number of people by poison gas, and for other reasons. All told, it repaid 45,510 gas chamber murders in that it found some defendants guilty of having killed or contributed to the murder of a certain number of inmates. As to the question, how many prisoners had been killed by poison gas in Auschwitz all in all, the court had given no answer and did not have the duty to do so. The determination of the total count of victims is properly a scientific question. That having been said, this would also mean that the Stuttgart Court did not have the duty nor the competence either to make a judgment about the total death toll of Auschwitz, that is, it should not have criticized others for asking questions and having different views in this regard.

It remains true that German justice has judicially determined a figure of 45,510 gas chamber deaths, no more, no less, and that anything more is a scientific question and not a question of criminal justice. It must be asked then, why one should proceed against people with threats of criminal penalty and use of the magic formula 'common knowledge,' who do nothing else but to assert that counts of victims as high as several hundred thousand or even several millions are greatly exaggerated, particularly since several well-known mainstream authors do make similar statements. Only that can be judicially claimed to be 'common knowledge' which has been determined to be so in court on examination of evidence. With respect to the number of victims of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, that has not been done.

In the written basis for the decision, as proof of their assertion that the epilogue of the Remer version had deliberately created the impression that the Holocaust was used by Jews to exploit Germany, the Court gave this one example (decision, p. 235):

"This applies especially to the reprinting of a letter claimed to have been written by a Jew on May 2, 1991 (p. IV of the epilogue, p. 113 above). Together with the assertion that the Holocaust was an invention of the Jews, this deliberately inflames hatred against the Jews."

In the epilogue in a display box one sees that Remer has quoted a letter with a sender's address in Israel, in which the writer inquires about financial reparations based on the claim that his uncle was allegedly gassed in the concentration camp at Dachau. That this letter was written by a Jew is not mentioned anywhere, nor is there any reference to the religious affiliation of this person in this article. There is also no assertion in Remer's (or his friend's) comments "that the Holocaust was an invention of the Jews," quite contrary to what the court claims. All that Remer's friend did was to juxtapose the letter from Israel with a letter from the City of Dachau, in which the latter clarifies that there had never been any homicidal gassings in the concentration camp at Dachau.

The court had not examined whether or not this letter existed, therefore, on the principle "In dubio pro reo," it had to assume that it did exist. In fact, not just Remer but also many other activists had photocopies of the letter which Remer's friend had reproduced in the appendix to Remer's version. It is a fact that there is a large number of statements from witnesses attesting to homicidal gassing in Dachau, but it is also well known that both the official Dachau Concentration Camp Museum as well as the City of Dachau clearly state that there were never any homicidal gassings of humans in this concentration camp.[575]

These well-recognized facts were given with the documents published or quoted by Remer (or his friend), which cannot be a crime. In his commentary on this letter, Remer points out that false witness statements like the one quoted here, attesting to his uncle's death in a Dachau gas chamber, serve as a basis for 'common knowledge' in Germany. Nowhere did he make the claim that anybody had lied for purposes of material enrichment. It is the court that is to blame for the charge that the reader would get the impression from these two reproduced documents, Remer wanted to impute, Jews had invented a lie for the purpose of exploiting Germany.

That even Jews sometimes make false statements about the period between 1945 and 1993 cannot be disputed. This was particularly clear in the criminal trial of John Demjanjuk in Jerusalem. The trial ended with an acquittal for the accused, since even the Israeli court could not shut its eyes to the flood of false documents and false witness testimony.[576] Fortunately, in this case also, Jewish personalities turned against the flood of untruths that appeared in this trial.[577]

That the same untrustworthy witnesses who appeared in this Jerusalem trial had made similar (incredible) statements in trials in Germany and elsewhere, did not affect their credibility in the eyes of the German court, of course.

In addition, the advertising blitz of the Jews Aze Brauner and his friends on May 6, 1995, in the German daily newspapers Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung and Süddeutschen Zeitung, which rehashed the old lies about soap made of the fat of Jews and lampshades made of human skin which have been repudiated even by the Holocaust Institute Yad-Vashem of Jerusalem,[578] did not serve to make our jurists consider that not everything a Jew says about the years from 1933 to 1945 is necessarily true.

Even the recently reconfirmed information that the Jew Ilya Ehrenburg, who was Stalin's chief propagandist, was one of the worst deceivers and liars in questions of the supposed National Socialist annihilation of the Jews[579] does not appear to impress anyone in Germany. On the contrary, the Federal German justice system seems to opine that a Jew always tells the truth and that a non-Jew who accuses a Jew of reporting falsehoods or even lying belongs in jail.[580]

In the decision of the 17th Criminal Chamber of the District Court Stuttgart, there is this discussion on Remer's preface and epilogue (p. 115):

"Although preface and epilogue do not expressly accuse the Jews of having invented the accounts on the Holocaust particularly to gain political and material advantages,"

-read: although the crime of which Germar Rudolf was accused of had not been committed...

"in the eyes of this court the purpose of the Remer-Version of the 'Expert Report' is nevertheless to suggest this"

-read: the judges can read the mind and intention of the accused...

"and hence to stir up hostile emotions against the Jews. Provided that the claims of the 'Expert Report' are correct,"

-the court did nothing to find out whether or not Rudolf's Expert Report is correct, so it had to assume that it indeed is correct...

"this arises already from the fact that the reader, among others due to the tendentious statements and attitude, must and had to come to the conclusion that the [...] Jews must have consciously forged the accounts on the Holocaust."

-read: even if the Expert Report is correct, the publisher has to make sure that his readers don't think wrongly, or he will be punished for that, and the judges know the effect of this publication on the reader without even having any evidence for it.

This meant the expert witness was not only punished for a crime that he had not committed, but also for one that no one had committed in the first place. The crime was invented by the court-they ignored the facts and fantasized about what may be written between the lines!

Even though this was Rudolf's first conviction, this sentence could, according to the court, not be suspended, (p. 239):

"if only because no positive social prognosis can be made for the accused (§56 para. 1. Penal Code), who is to be categorized as a fanatical, politically motivated criminal. During and despite of the current trial, the accused did publish more 'revisionist' works or prepared them, which once again proves his views. These, too, use the same strategy of apparent objectivity to deny the Holocaust. For example, in fall 1994 the book 'Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte' [=Dissecting the Holocaust, August 2000] appeared, and the book against Pressac was prepared. The Court has therefore no doubt that, in regard of the laws mentioned, the accused is not willing to be a law abiding citizen." (emphasis added)

Here the court openly admits that it sentenced Rudolf to a prison term because of his scholarly convictions which allegedly render him an incorrigible criminal. No more proof is needed to show that Rudolf is politically persecuted in Germany.

Furthermore, the court uses publications, which it had called "scholarly" at the beginning of the verdict and which at that time had not yet finally been declared illegal by any court decision, to justify a prison term without probation.

By the time the judges handed down their verdict in June 1995, Rudolf had published three books. About the first, Rudolf's Expert Report on chemical and technical details of the alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz, the verdict states at page 23:

"This work, the basis of his publishing activities, is essentially written in a scholarly style. It addresses a chemical detail (the problem of hydrocyanic acid) and does not make any general political conclusions."

In general, the verdict says about Rudolf's three main works (Expert Report, Vorlesungen zur Zeitgeschichte, Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte):

"They are characterized by a scholarly attitude with reference to his expertise as a scientifically trained chemist. Tone and form are generally held in a way, as if they were interested only in the matter. Additionally, intensive discussions of details, tables and graphs as well as voluminous references to literature are meant to give the impression of an unbiased and open-minded scholarship. This is primarily true for the three large publications of the accused" (p. 23 of verdict)

About Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte-now published in English under Dissecting the Holocaust-the verdict says, it includes "a maximum appearance of objectivity" (p. 26), which later was confirmed by two German mainstream historians in expert reports they wrote in support of Rudolf's scholarly work. Of course, the court had to insert the word "appearance", to cast doubt on the quality of these works, because otherwise it could not possibly have sentenced Rudolf.

Considering the contempt and hate this verdict shows against Germar Rudolf, such words of open endorsement cannot be underestimated. Since the court had to admit that Rudolf's main works are formally scientific and scholarly (form, i.e., appearance, not content, is the only criterion for scholarly works!), the accused could not possibly have committed any crime by publishing them, since the German constitution guarantees the freedom of science without restriction in article 5.3 of the German Basic Law (Germany's unofficial constitution). So Remer's additions were used instead to tie the rope around Rudolf's neck.

With this finding, the court turned the historical dissident (revisionist) Germar Rudolf into a "thought criminal".

It should be pointed out here that in May 2002, Fritjof Meyer, an editor of Germany's largest, left-wing weekly magazine Der Spiegel, stated in a scholarly article addressing the alleged death toll of Auschwitz that the evidence indicates only some failed test gassings for the Birkenau crematoria, but no mass murder on a genocidal scale.[581] This sensational statement is close to the claim Rudolf has been making since 1992, i.e., that "the mass gassings [...] did not take place [as] claimed by witnesses". Hence, Meyer's article is nothing short of a partial but timely rehabilitation of Rudolf, and it might take only one or two more revisions of the official historiography of Auschwitz to reach the point where it agrees totally with what Rudolf is stating in his expert report.

I pondered a long time over the question whether or not to reprint Remer's comments, since they caused me an awful lot of distress. But I think he had a perfect right to say what he had to say, and it was really a scandal how the German legal system persecuted this old man. Though I do not agree with everything Remer and his friend wrote, and much less with their style, I decided to reprint these comments in full, so that the reader can understand, how easy one can get imprisoned in Germany for making, endorsing, or-as in my case-simply being associated with hot-headed, but perfectly legal and harmless statements.

To all friends, countrymen and people who love the truth: I am in distress!

On October 22, 1992, the District Court of Schweinfurt, Judge Siebenbürger presiding, sentenced me to 22 months prison without probation. This is the equivalent of a death sentence for me.

The trial against me was not a real trial. The main session of the trial ended in a deadlock. The sentence was equivalent to the destruction of an 80-year old man. I was not permitted to defend myself against charges consisting of lies, harassment, and attacks on my honor. The court denied me the possibility of defense by means of sec. 186 of the German Penal Code. It refused to put my assertions to the test of examination.

ret. Major General Otto Ernst Remer in 1992

My defense attorney had asked the expert witness Rudolf to appear. This expert witness was in the courtroom, his expert report had already been submitted along with other official records. However, the expert witness was not allowed to speak and the expert report was not allowed to be read. The expert report and irrefutable scientific facts were denied by presiding judge Siebenbürger.

No physical evidence has ever been presented in court to support claims of homicidal gassings: no document, no photo, and no orders from military or civil authorities. Can you imagine that a group of people as large as the population of Munich could be annihilated without leaving any traces of the crime? The only proofs of mass homicidal gassings are absurd witness statements. In the great Frankfurt Auschwitz trial (50/4 Ks 2/63) the court 'proved' the existence of homicidal gas chambers with the testimony of a single eye-witness, named Böck, who reported having seen thousands of Jews killed with Zyklon B. He testified that he "saw with my own eyes" how the prisoners' commando worked without any protective garment in the midst of this Zyklon B gas, still hovering in blue clouds over the corpses, without suffering ill effects. What is the difference between Böck's testimony and that of eye-witnesses who confirmed under oath that they saw witches riding brooms on their way to the Blocksberg?

In a powerful and irrefutable scientific work, my expert witness made a shattering discovery. The buildings in Auschwitz which are pointed out to tourists as homicidal gas chambers, in which millions of Jews were allegedly killed, never came in contact with Zyklon B. The analyses were carried out by no less an organization than the renowned Fresenius Institute. Notable historians agree that this research will revise world history.

The masonry samples taken by Rudolf were analyzed by the renowned Institut Fresenius.

This expert report has been in the hands of the Federal Chancellor, the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany), the Federal Attorney General, the Ministry of Justice, and notable scientists and personalities for more than a year. Every one of them remained as quiet as a mouse.

The condition under which my expert witness agreed to testify was that his report should be presented only to the court. He specifically forbade me to make his report available to the public. However, since the Auschwitz Lie has become an instrument which threatens the existence of all Germans, I can no longer allow myself to be bound by this condition.

I myself shall die in prison for publishing scientific facts. By means of an unbelievably satanic twisting of history our people will be held defenseless and "subject to extortion", as the Association of German Veterans wrote in its journal Soldat im Volk no. 7/8 in 1992. In this condition of eternal abject surrender we shall be destroyed by means of a horrifying 'multiculturalism.' This has forced me to a desperate defensive measure, which takes the form of unauthorized publication of Rudolf's Expert Report on the alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Since 1945, generations of German politicians have not only acquiesced in these ghastly lies against the German nation, they have participated in manufacturing them. The same applies to the mass media. These elements are doing everything they can to propagate the most vicious lies in the history of mankind through the German criminal justice system. When the truth comes to light, these corrupt and venal politicians know that they will be scorned by the public. The media brotherhood know they will be reviled as liars and driven from their posh editorial offices.

This whole pack of liars should be scorned and despised, deprived of position and driven from their spoils fortresses for what they have done to our people. I would like to contribute to this.

You too can help distribute this Expert Report. In the first phase of this operation, I myself will send copies to 1,000 leading Germans. Among them will be leaders of the military, business, scientific, and university communities, in particular members of chemistry and history faculties. I shall send a copy to every representative in parliament as well as media personalities.

In the second and third phases, I shall send another 1,000 copies of this scientific report. No person of prominence will be able to say that he did not know the truth.

These operations will be very expensive since postage alone costs 4 Marks per copy. Therefore I need your support. By ordering a copy of the Expert Report, you will be helping help me to distribute this irrefutable scientific document. Additional contributions will enable additional distribution. I am counting on your help.

Faithfully yours, Otto Ernst Remer, 25th October 1992

I have added Sections I-V of the report of my trial in Schweinfurt. After reading this report, you will understand the desperation of my defense effort.

[Appendix]

Justice in Germany 1992:
"Death Sentence for General Remer"

This trial report by E. Haller is taken from REMER DEPESCHE no. 6/1992

Kahlenbergerdorf

(Austria), the 2.6.1988,

Source: Honsik, Acquittal for Hitler?

As a Roman Catholic priest I say to you ... question the existence of gas chambers in the Third Reich. It is the right of those who seek the truth to be allowed to doubt, investigate and evaluate. Wherever this doubting and evaluating is forbidden, wherever someone demands that he must be believed, an arrogance arises that is a blasphemy to God. This is why. If those whom you doubt have the truth on their side, they will accept any questions gracefully and answer them patiently. They will no longer hide their proofs and their records. If these are lying, they will cry for the judge. That is how you will recognize them. The truth is always graceful, while lies cry out for earthly judges.

Respectfully,

with best regards,

/s/ Pastor Viktor Robert Knirsch

Schweinfurt (EH) - On October 22, 1992, the First Great Criminal Chamber of the District Court of Schweinfurt, Judge Siebenbürger presiding, sentenced General Remer for publication of a scientific expert report. The main point of the expert report Remer had published was: there were no mass killings in Auschwitz with Zyklon B. The court called this publication 'incitement to racial hatred,' and Siebenbürger imposed on General Remer a sentence of 22 months imprisonment without probation. State Attorney Baumann demanded a 30 months prison term and moved for the immediate arrest of the 80-year old defendant in the courtroom. Observers of the trial began to suspect that the sentence had been decided before the trial began. At 9:00 hours on October 20, 1992, the day the trial opened, radio BAYERN 1 had announced: "This time it will cost Remer. [

...] this time the punishment will be harder." How did the announcer from B1 know that General Remer would be punished more severely than in previous trials? Why was an acquittal not conceivable?

This document is one of many that were presented to the court as evidence.

Answer: "Denied on grounds of common knowledge."

FOREIGN OFFICE

214-E-Stuparek

Bonn , 8th Jan. 1979

Dear Mr. Stuparek!

Federal Minister Genscher has asked me to respond to your letter of December 21, 1978.

As far as I know, there were no gas chambers in the camp of Auschwitz ...

Best regards,

For the Federal Minister,

/s/ Dr. Scheel

What had Remer done? As editor of the periodical Remer Depesche, the highly-decorated front-line officer had published the results of a number of scientific expert reports. One of them was the Leuchter Report, which former Minister of Justice Engelhard described as "scientific research". Fred Leuchter is a constructor of execution gas chambers that use hydrogen cyanide in the USA. Later, the Director of the Auschwitz Museum, Dr. F. Piper, assigned the Jan Sehn Institut in Cracow to make a similar expert report. A technical expert report in German in conjunction with the renowned Institute Fresenius followed in February 1992. The discussion that the General had opened up with his publications was desired even by the Federal President. A letter from the Presidential Office on October 23, 1989, states that von Weizsäcker "will follow the discussion [on the Leuchter Report] closely". Had the Federal President lured General Remer into a trap with this letter? Remer naturally felt that ex-Minister of Justice Engelhard and the Federal President had encouraged him to publish his facts.

Homicidal gas chambers that never came in contact with gas

All three expert reports came to the same conclusion: The gas chambers of Auschwitz and Birkenau testified to by witnesses never came in contact with Zyklon B. In legal terms: the weapon was not loaded. For better understanding: When hydrogen cyanide (Zyklon B) comes into contact with concrete or stones, it forms permanent compounds with traces of iron in such building material. The compound that develops is blue (hence the German name Blue Acid (Blausäure) for hydrogen cyanide, although the gas itself is colorless) and occurs on the surface and within the walls exposed to gas. Today, one can easily see a massive blue dyeing on both inner and outer walls in the delousing buildings. There is no such dyeing in the alleged homicidal gas chambers. Chemical analyses of samples from the delousing buildings show very high concentrations of cyanide, while no traces can be found in samples from the alleged gas chambers. Scientific expert reports were never produced for any of the numerous National Socialist trials. No physical proof was ever offered.

In Nuremberg, the propaganda lies of the victors were given reference numbers. Since then they have become 'facts.'

All courts have continually prevented all gas chamber skeptics from use of any evidence for their scientific investigations. The courts have taken the point of view that the homicidal gas chambers should be regarded as commonly known 'facts'. 'Commonly known' means that the existence of homicidal gas chambers is as certain a fact as that the day has 24 hours. The Nuremberg Military Tribunal introduced the use of 'common knowledge' into judicial practice. Pure war horror propaganda items from the Second World War were turned into 'facts' (IMT-Statutes 19 and 21) which had to be accepted without question by the accused. Defense attorneys who attempted to prove the opposite were threatened with the death penalty. The Stalinist massacre at Katyn was one of the charges, as well as homicidal gassings in the former concentration camp Dachau (IMT Document 2430-PS). In Document 3311-PS, the Polish government "put the victors' tribunal on notice" that hundreds of thousands of Jews had been "steamed" at Treblinka. Note: "steamed", not 'gassed'. Today, the Holocausters look down shamefully when they are confronted with this nonsense. In the great National Socialist trial before the District and Chamber Court of Berlin (ref. PKs 3-50) it was determined: "There were no gas chamber structures in the concentration camp Majdanek". But in Schweinfurt, General Remer was sentenced to imprisonment because he had published in his Depeschen the court's determination on the absence of gas chambers in Majdanek.

To destroy the German people, only these words are necessary: 'common knowledge.'

Concerning the alleged gas chambers, no one can speak of the kind of common knowledge such as that which underlies the fact that the day has 24 hours. Only such assertions, as that the day has 24 hours, require no proof. In all other cases there must be proof.

Remer's proofs are new and far superior

The defense attorneys, Hajo Herrmann and Dr. Herbert Schaller, had prepared comprehensive evidence. They prepared their evidence to conform with a decision of the Upper District Court of Düsseldorf. In a 'gas chamber denial' case, this court held that evidence must be admitted when it was superior to the 'proofs' in the former National Socialist trials. New, superior evidence trumps 'common knowledge', according to the Düsseldorf court. The evidence submitted by the defense is new and far superior to that from the National Socialist trials, since there was no physical evidence presented there.

Herr Judge Siebenbürger, Herr State Attorney Baumann, please tell me which of the following figures is 'common knowledge'. Why have you not told the General during the trial which number he should believe in? For which number should Remer now die in prison?

Comparison of official figures on the number of those killed
in the gas chambers of Auschwitz:

Before the examination of the evidence that had been submitted, attorney Herrmann addressed the State Attorney and judge: "It must be proven, whether there were gas chambers or not, before there can be a decision on common knowledge. The court must determine facts." Attorney Herrmann then presented evidence taken from anti-fascist literature and from court documents that showed that Auschwitz was no annihilation camp. The attorney read how there had been a brothel for prisoners in Lager Auschwitz, that there had been weekly soccer games between SS staff and camp inmates, that there was a central sauna, that legal advice was available to the inmates, that in case of non-natural death the camp administration had to notify the appropriate State Attorney with over 30 signatures, that prisoners could be released, that SS-men were not allowed to hit prisoners, that 4,800 sick persons were under medical care (although in the usual version, they landed in the 'gas chambers' right away), and that, when the camp was abandoned, the prisoners preferred evacuation by the SS over Soviet 'liberation'...

The State Attorney roars

This piece of evidence made the State Attorney roar. "This piece of evidence is an insult to the victims", he yelled into the courtroom with a red face. Herrmann replied, "Then your victims were insulted by the decision in the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, Herr State Attorney. Most of what I have just read are observations of the court in the great Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. You can read them in the decision." At this the State Attorney was speechless. It is peculiar, how a State Attorney can free himself from almost any evidentiary difficulty with only two magical words: 'common knowledge'. He knew nothing about the decision in the National Socialist trials and he knew next to nothing about historical connections or physical facts. All a state attorney needs in such a case is to be able to pronounce the words, "denied on account of common knowledge."

The court refused to accept this evidence. That is, it refused to accept whole passages from the decision in the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt as well as passages from the writings of 'survivors' such as Langbein. Naturally, on account of "common knowledge".

The English crown: no gassings

As part of the evidence he submitted, Dr. Schaller presented the book of Jewish Princeton Professor Arno J. Mayer. In his book, Mayer concludes that the majority of Auschwitz prisoners died of natural causes and that there was no "Hitler order" for the 'gassing' of the Jews. Mayer confirms that "proofs" for the gas chambers are "rare and unreliable". As evidence against the 'common knowledge of gas chambers', the attorney submitted a book by British history professor F. H. Hinsley. Hinsley is the official historian of the English crown. His book British Intelligence in the Second World War can be obtained from the royal stationer's office. There was a new edition in 1989. On page 673, Hinsley states that from 1942 the English were able to break the coded messages from the German concentration camps. The English found that the main cause of death in the camps was illness. Hinsley reports that there were also shootings and hangings. The official historical scientist of the English royal house states: "There was no mention of gassings in the decoded messages."

The State Attorney moved that this evidence, too, be refused on account of 'common knowledge'. One more time, the court agreed with the State Attorney. At this point, the trial was suspended. It resumed on October 22, 1992. Every time General Remer reentered the courtroom after a pause in the proceedings, the public stood respectfully. Many remained sitting when the court entered, however.

An expert witness is kept out

The defense surprised the court with an evidence physically present in the court room, the technical expert Diplom-Chemist G. Rudolf. By the court's rules of procedure, evidence that is physically present can not be refused, even on account of 'common knowledge'. The technical expert sat in the courtroom. He had researched the alleged gas chambers in Auschwitz from a physico-chemical point of view. He had taken samples of mortar and had them analyzed by the Institute Fresenius. Also he had conducted his own laboratory experiments in which he had gassed masonry with hydrogen cyanide. The expert witness could present scientific proof that the alleged gas chambers never came in contact with Zyklon B. The expert report prepared by the expert witness was submitted to the court with the rest of the evidence. The expert witness could also prove that prisoner commandos could not have "gone into blue clouds of Zyklon B still hovering over the corpses", without having been killed themselves. This nonsensical testimony on work in the midst of clouds of Zyklon B had been given by Richard Böck, the principal witness in the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. Thus Böck was asserting that the commando had been immune to Zyklon B. Yet the judge in the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt believed that he had proved the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz with Böck's statement. Böck had witnessed the gassings in two farm-houses which never existed, according to a technical report of HANSA LUFTBILD, which analyzed Allied air-reconnaissance photos. The expert witness could also prove that hydrogen cyanide is a colorless poison. The expert witness was sitting in the courtroom. He could provide clarification. What did the State Attorney have to say about that?

"I move that the expert witness be refused, since the gas chambers are common knowledge fact", was State Attorney's monotonous refrain. He demanded that the expert witness be refused without his technical qualifications having been examined. The court agreed with the motion of the State Attorney and refused the expert witness, without having heard a word he had to say, as "completely unsuitable evidence". In addition, the court refused to read the expert report, because of 'common knowledge.'

No one can see the Auschwitz death-books

Attorney Herrmann next submitted a large selection from the official death books of Auschwitz. In 1989, these death books had been released by the Soviet Union. These official papers documented 66,000 cases of death in minute detail. All of them are under seal at the special effects office in Arolsen. No one is allowed to look at them. A ten country commission, including Israel, prevents any inspection of these documents. Recently, the journalist W. Kempkens succeeded in photocopying these documents in the Moscow archive. Herrmann submitted a representative sample to the court. The defense attorney moved that Kempkens be allowed to testify. The Holocausters keep talking about how the old and unfit-for-work Jews were sorted out on the 'ramp' and 'gassed' immediately, so they could not have been entered in the camp register. The death books prove the opposite. Most of the entries were elderly men and most were Jews. The State Attorney moved that the documents should not be admitted as evidence, since the gas chambers are 'common knowledge' fact. The court agreed with the motion of the State Attorney.

The State Attorney's pleading

At that point, the taking of evidence was ended and the State Attorney began his pleading. He did not need any evidence, since for him the 'gas chambers' are 'common knowledge.' He described Remer as Mephisto (the devil) for "denying" what is "common knowledge." For such a "devil", he argued, the absolute minimum sentence should be imprisonment for two years and six months. He moved that the imprisonment begin immediately.

Defense Attorney Herrmann's pleading

Defense Attorney ret. Colonel Hajo Herrmann

The attorney protested, "We have submitted evidence in many areas, but the court has never undertaken to examine whether the accused had a valid claim." Once more Herrmann discussed the denial of evidence in connection with the 'confession' of the former camp commander of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höß. "The court had refused to allow the reading of Höß's torture with the comment that it had not been proven that Höß had made a false confession because of torture. But Höß's confession is false", thundered the retired colonel, a former inspector of Germany's WWII night fighters, in the courtroom. "Höß confessed 3 million murdered Jews. Today Holocaust historians say the number killed is 1.5 million", he flung at the State Attorney and judge. Then Herrmann read the record of the capture of Höß. It is described there how the former commandant was thrown on a butcher bench and how his face was smashed for hours. The Jewish sergeant shoved a guide-lamp staff deep in his throat and dumped a whole bottle of whiskey into his victim. His handcuffs were left on for three weeks. "That's what you don't want to hear, Herr State Attorney", the defense attorney's words rang out. Then Herrmann read relevant paragraphs from the transfer treaty of the occupying powers. In these paragraphs, Germany was forced to recognize forever the historical 'facts' that were the basis of the Nuremberg trials. And so German courts still say 'common knowledge' to the four million Auschwitz lie, to the lie about gassings in Dachau and the lie about "mass steamings" in Treblinka. Nonsense and oppression know no limit.

"I note", said the attorney, "that the accused was denied his right. Not only the State Attorney is bound politically. This is about an obligation imposed on the state by the transfer treaty of the victorious powers. But this treaty has no place in this court of law."

Judge Siebenbürger and State Attorney Baumann justified themselves with this kind of witness when they yell, "Evidence denied on account of common knowledge."

Holon, Israel, 2.5-1991

I once had an uncle in Karlsruhe B/Baden that was gast in Dchau. I can get some damajes frm this?? Much thank in advans!

[misspellings in source]

This text is taken from a letter that was mailed on May 2, 1991, from Holon/Israel to a German acquaintance with the request for help with an application for compensation. The writer's uncle was "gast" in Dachau and he wanted "damajes". For Judge Siebenbürger and State Attorney Baumann, this served to prove that the gas chambers are 'common knowledge'.

Response of the City of Dachau:

City of

DACHAU

District capital

coat of arms)

Our Ref.: 4.2/Ra/Sa

Artists' town for 1200 years Date: 14.11.88

Dear Herr Geller!

With reference to your question, I must inform you that there were no gassings in the former concentration camp Dachau ...

Best regards - Rahm; Director of Administration

Then he continued, "I have never before seen the public stand when an accused enters the courtroom. Yes, the general is no turncoat, and that is basically what you are accusing him of." Herrmann pinpointed the State Attorney's error: "The State Attorney refuses to accept as evidence the decision of the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, which counted 45,510 dead." Herrmann hammered on the conscience of the State Attorney, which does not exist. Then he continued, "But, according to the State Attorney, the accused must know that 6 million Jews were gassed." Herrmann turned to the judge's bench and shouts: "The court intends to prove that the defendant acted with criminal intent, that 'he knows it.'"

The public realized that this great man had lived through times where just dealing, dignity, honor, and decency were still common. A trial like the present was very difficult for him. Once again, Herrmann counted the denied pieces of evidence and asked, "Who in this courtroom was not well served by the defense?" Then he confronted the State Attorney and said, "The State Attorney will try to convince the accused that he knew that what he said was not true. Herr State Attorney, you do not sit in the back of the accused's head."

Then the attorney said what he thought was behind the court's-in many people's opinion-scandalous handling of the trial: "I believe that there is another power that hangs over our legal system that gives you your orders. I know that if you were to acquit, there would be a great howling-not just here, but mostly in other countries. If you fear this, you should decline to conduct the trial. How can you designate even one piece of evidence as superfluous when the issue is life or death, as it is here? You should recollect that the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg described the victorious powers' tribunal as a continuation of the war against Germany. One cannot so totally destroy and plunder a civilized people such as the Germans without an ostensible reason or pretext. Auschwitz was that pretext.

If 'common knowledge' does not endure forever, at what limit of common knowledge do we find ourselves now? Yes, this 'common knowledge' will collapse, but will the accused die in his prison cell beforehand?" With that, Attorney Herrmann ended his pleading.

Dr. Schaller's pleading

"This is a political trial of a very peculiar nature", the courageous Viennese attorney threw at the judge and State Attorney. "For the reason that it deals with a crime of opinion, where there was no violence. The defenders of democracy sit on the accuser's bench. When a democratic state takes upon itself the power to determine what the truth is, it is no longer a democracy", the attorney admonished the State Attorney and court.

Defense Attorney Dr. Herbert Schaller

Dr. Schaller told of a case in Frankfurt of an African drug dealer with a criminal history who stuck a 17 centimeter long knife into the abdomen of a young German because the latter did not want to buy drugs. The attorney quoted the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, as to how the judge in this case would not regard the assault as attempted murder or even as attempted manslaughter. She regarded it as a case of the African's merely wanting to "teach the German a lesson." This example of justice in modern day Germany that Dr. Schaller so graphically portrayed is reminiscent of the case of two Turks who stabbed an 18-year old German in Berlin because the latter had blond hair. Both Turks had already been convicted of manslaughter, yet they received probation. For the 80-year old General Remer who published scientific papers, the State Attorney wants the 'death sentence'. In the waiting room, people passed around articles from large German newspapers relating how foreign murderers, robbers and mankillers are set free because indictments cannot be prepared in time due to 'shortage of staff'. Every spectator was outraged that there was no shortage of judges to handle the prosecution and indictment of an acknowledged national hero because of his publication of the truth. Dr. Schaller said further: "To prosecute assertions of fact in the same way that murderers should be prosecuted-but today no longer are-will lead to social collapse.

The state should take care that arguments are expressed in words. The truth does not need criminal justice. The truth will prevail of its own power", the attorney scolded the State Attorney. The attorney further said: "Doesn't the State Attorney's demand for a two and a half year sentence for the publication of scientific knowledge smell of [communist east German] GDR justice? And such a thing for an 80-year old man? Is this Bautzen? [a prison for political prisoners in former communist east Germany]" demanded Dr. Schaller. "This defense team has introduced a plethora of evidence that supports the claims of the accused. A plethora of proofs and expert reports that has never been presented to any court of the victorious wartime Allies. And yet, the Allies' magic words from Nuremberg, 'common knowledge' should still apply here?" Facing the State Attorney, Schaller asked, "Suppose that we had a new government in Germany and this government were to examine the manner in which you servants of the state are proceeding, keeping in mind paragraphs 56 and 62 through 65 of the Basic Law. Do you think you would escape harm from the hands of the German people?" Then, facing the public: "Suppose the State Attorney had to justify his charges against the General. Suppose a judge should ask him, what proof do you have of the existence of homicidal gas chambers? He would have nothing to show. But as of today, no state attorney needs to produce evidence. We have not arrived at that point yet."

Next he quoted the Jewish revisionist, Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, who says: "Today, there is a whole spectrum of business relating to the Holocaust Industry, with authors, researchers, museum curators and politicians." To the judges' bench, Dr. Schaller hollered, "The real threat to public order begins when one demands of the German people that they should assume guilt for gas chamber murders.

These are dangerous perversions which construe publication of scientific investigation of alleged gas chambers as defamation and incitement to racial hatred. How does the State Attorney dispute this scientific evidence which the accused has published? He merely tells us that we Germans should and must remain guilty as charged at the Nuremberg trials following World War II. That is all.

On the other hand, defense counsel have an expert witness here in the chamber who has produced an expert report that leaves no question unanswered. The expert witness has come to the indisputable scientific conclusion that the so-called gas chambers never came in contact with Zyklon B gas. Never!"

Schaller continued, "There sits the technical expert, who is not allowed to say a word. A scientist from the world renowned Max-Planck-Institute is not allowed to testify in a German court! And you want to send General Remer to prison? Are you willing to accept responsibility for that?"

Then, raising his voice: "The accused has the right to expect that the court will fulfill its duty. that is, to inquire into the innocence of the accused. This kowtowing to the victorious Allies of World War II cannot go on forever!" With the following words tears came to his eyes: "Why should a man be put to the sword to keep alive this mythology of wartime propaganda? Mr. State Attorney, you should not continue believing novels that become ever more lurid with the passage of time. It cannot go on like this, to leave one's own people standing out in the cold. Please allow the introduction of evidence once more." Thus the defense attorney closed his pleading.

The General's closing words

"To this kangaroo court that has denied me the introduction of scientific evidence I have only one thing to say." General Remer pointed at the state attorney and the judge. "Germany will one day hold you responsible for what you have done in this courtroom."

Resume

General Remer seems to be dangerous to the former victorious powers because he has brought about a discussion of Auschwitz with his scientific publications. If Remer can prove his case, the Allies will lose their justification for having butchered and looted the German people. The Jews will lose, as Prof. Wolffsohn says, "their only remaining identity-forming myth." For these reasons, General Remer is condemned to die in jail. This death sentence is reminiscent of other cases of unsolved deaths such as those of Franz Josef Strauß and his wife Marianne. First Marianne died of unexplained causes in a traffic accident, then the fit, healthy former Minister President of Bavaria passed away under unusual circumstances which are not medically explicable.

The Allgemeing Jüdische Wochenzeitung (German Jewish weekly newspaper) of October 29, 1992, recalled Strauß' goals: "The declaration of Franz J. Strauß on February 1, 1987, that the Federal Republic should come out from under the shadow of the Nazi past and begin a new chapter in the book of history..."

The transfer treaty of the victorious powers forbids Germany to "come out from under the shadow of the Nazi past and begin a new chapter in the book of history". The Allies would lose forever their justification for the horrendous crimes and ethnic cleansing which they committed against Germany, and the Jews would lose their identity-forming principle. This might endanger the existence of the state of Israel. Are there parallels between Remer's 'death sentence' and the death of Marianne and F. J. Strauß?

Since the 7th of May 1995, Judge Burkhardt Stein of the County Court of Tübingen held court on the fates of the publisher, editor, and some of the authors of the fundamental revisionist work Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte (ref. 4 Gs 173/95).[570] First, the proceedings against the authors were separated on various grounds. Next, the trial against the editor Ernst Gauss alias Germar Rudolf was separated since the accused was not present at the proceedings. For that reason, Judge Stein issued an arrest warrant against Rudolf.

During the trial, the public attorney and the judge accused the publisher Wigbert Grabert that the incriminated book would meet the test for the crime of inciting to racial hatred in that it used a number of Holocaust denying adjectives such as "supposed", "presumed" and "so-called". In order to show that the book had scientific merits, the defense attorney insisted that while reading certain passages from the book, one needed to consult the comprehensive and detailed footnotes that it contained, which made reference mostly to books of establishment sources. The judge merely turned toward Susanne Teschner, the public attorney, and answered that the court would not think out loud during the trial. The court denied numerous motions of the defense for recourse to relevant expert reports or for access to court records that might show that the words "supposed", and so forth, did not per se constitute an intentional denying.

The court also denied two motions of the defense to suspend the trial on grounds that in this trial there was theoretically no possibility that the judge would acquit the accused, because in such a case the judge himself might encounter social harassment or even criminal reprisal from the judicial system, as the case of Judge Orlet in the trial against the revisionist Günter Deckert had shown.

Several days after the beginning of the trial, the expert witness Dr. Joachim Hoffmann was interrogated as to whether the book Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte was scientific. Dr. Hoffmann, for decades a historian in the Militärgeschichtliche Forschungsamt (Military History Research Department) of the German Bundeswehr in Freiburg, wrote an expert report on request of the defendant Germar Rudolf (see below).

During his interrogation, the expert witness stated that terms such as "presumed" or "supposed" did not please him, yet he did not consider that they put the scientific merit of the book in question.

The public attorney's pleading was next. The phrases in the book that offended her most-"supposed annihilation camp", "Auschwitz bludgeon", "Holocaust religion", "identity-forming group fantasies", "supposed genocide", "established Holocaust scene", "lead ad absurdum"-although taken partly from established publications, deny the National Socialist murder of Jews and therefore qualify as incitement to racial hatred. According to the public attorney, the expert witness Dr. Hoffmann was no more competent to judge whether the book was scientific than a judge or a state attorney is, and his expert report should therefore be disregarded. The publisher Grabert should be sentenced to 9 months prison on probation.

On the last day of the trial, held on a Saturday(!),[582]June 15, 1996, in his pleading the defense attorney referred to the denunciations of the public attorney, whereby the book was allegedly a pseudoscientific hack-job of the vilest sort, saying that this sort of speech was "pseudo-legal browbeating" without content or definition. The defense pointed to the high degree of scientific expertise that had been necessary to produce the book and also to the fact that the expert witness had unreservedly confirmed the book's scientific quality. He also pointed out that sec. 130 para. 3 of the German Penal Code (StGB, incitement to racial hatred) was unconstitutional when it served to deliver proven scientific publications up to book-burning.

The judge sentenced the publisher Grabert to pay a fine of DM 30,000 ($15,000) and ordered the seizure-in effect, the burning-of all copies of Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte as well as all materials needed to produce it. In the written verdict, he stated that although parts of the book had scientific merit, phrases such as "supposed", "presumed", "burnt sacrifice of the Jews", "imputed systematic nature", "furious fantasies", although partly drawn from citations of established personages, denied the Holocaust and therefore qualified as the crime of incitement to racial hatred.

A Historian's Expert Report

Joachim Hoffmann was born on December 1, 1930, in Königsberg, East Prussia. Since 1951, he initially studied natural sciences, but later changed to study modern history, eastern European history, and comparative ethnology at the University of Hamburg and the Free University of Berlin. He ended his studies with a PhD degree in 1959/1960. In the same year, he became Academic Director at the Militärgeschichtliche Forschungsamt, the official historical research institute of the German Armed Forces. He stayed in this position until he retired in 1995, more and more specializing on the German-Soviet war of 1941-1945. He has published numerous articles and books and won several cultural awards. Dr. Hoffmann died in February 2002. The following is the text of his expert report written in defence of Germar Rudolf and his anthology Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte (Dissecting the Holocaust).[583]

Preamble

Accredited chemist Germar Rudolf has written me to request an expert statement regarding an anthology titled Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte: Ein Handbuch über strittige Fragen des 20. Jahrhunderts (Foundations on Contemporary History. A Handbook of Points at Issue of the 20th Century), edited by Ernst Gauss and published in 1994 by Grabert-Verlag in Tübingen, Germany. The foremost issue was to be the question of the work's scientific, i.e., academic nature, rather than the content per se.

As a historian specializing in recent and East European history, and on the basis of my decades of professional experience and practice in the academic service of the Federal Republic of Germany, I am qualified and entitled to give an expert opinion on the matter in question.

Regarding my personal qualifications, I wish to state that I was a member of the Militärgeschichtliche Forschungsamt (Military History Research Department) in Freiburg from 1960 to 1995. For almost three decades, my work has focused exclusively on matters related to the German-Soviet war. Through the publication of academic books and periodical articles on this topic I am well established as an expert in my field, both at home and abroad. Accredited chemist Rudolf and the co-authors of the anthology at issue are not personally known to me.

The Formal Aspect

As pointed out in the anthology in question, the book does not offer a comprehensive overview of the course of the National Socialist persecution of the Jews during World War Two. Rather, the focus is on specific individual topics regarding disputed and controversial aspects of killings of the Jews. The various contributions to the book are expertly written in a predominantly investigative style. Where detail and completeness are concerned, the body of supporting and documenting references leaves little to be desired and is extremely helpful to a reader seeking further information, not least of all since sources from the opposing subject literature are also cited without reservation. It appears, therefore, that this anthology is part of the large-scale academic dispute over a serious contemporary issue which reaches far beyond its actual academic scope and into the political realm.

The individual contributions to this anthology are logically consistent and objectively descriptive in structure, even though at times a polemical note does become evident-as is perhaps inevitable in such emotionally charged topics, and as is also quite common in political and historical controversies. In any case, a striving for new understanding is tangibly apparent throughout the book. From this perspective, therefore, the anthology cannot be denied an academic character, particularly if one compares it with many a publication from its opposing side, whose academic nature is also never questioned. There is much in the various contributions that strikes one as thoroughly convincing. Much else may be merely noted with objective interest. Elsewhere, doubts and criticisms also come to mind. The issue may perhaps be simplified by pointing out that what we are dealing with in this great controversy is a rather more accusatory style of literature on the one hand, and a rather more apologetic one on the other. This is to suggest that in the heat of controversy, both sides may be overly inclined to overshoot the mark and to leave the solid ground of provable facts behind. One might perhaps summarize by saying that the time for conclusive declarations regarding the great persecution of the Jews has not yet come.

The Problem of Self-Evidentness

There can be no doubt about the fact that genocide was committed against the Jewish people by the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD and by the SS personnel in charge in the concentration camps in the former General Government of Poland. Hitler, Himmler and Dr. Goebbels clearly admitted these misdeeds on several occasions. The anthology's editor, Ernst Gauss, also considers this as given in his chapter. And in fact, the genocide provides an unspoken backdrop for the anthology at issue. To rule out any misunderstanding, it would perhaps have been better to spell these things out unambiguously and to clarify that an academic controversy today can no longer dispute the mass killings per se, but rather only the numbers of victims and the methods of murder. In this respect, we admittedly may expect to see far-reaching modifications as yet. In this context as well, the rather overused concept of self-evidentness is in need of limitation, or at least of a more precise definition.

Two Important Examples

We shall give two especially significant examples of this.

1) From 1945 to 1990, the figure of 4 million victims in Auschwitz was considered self-evident and was accorded judicial notice in the Federal German courts. But where did this figure come from? It originated with Soviet war propaganda. On March 1, 1945, an official Soviet announcement stated for the first time that "at least five million people were exterminated" in Auschwitz. This figure was then reduced to four million in the official Soviet communiqué of May 7, 1945. This number of 4 million victims-put about by Soviet war propaganda, in other words by the NKVD, and in no way proven by any evidence whatsoever-was adopted by the public in western countries, and persisted unchanged until 1990, when it was officially reduced to 1.5 million virtually overnight. Currently the number of Auschwitz victims is set at a remaining 631,000 to 711,000, and a further reduction has not been ruled out.

Dr. Joachim Hoffmann

2) To this day the total number of Jewish victims is generally given as 6 million. According to the current opinion of the German experts on contemporary history, this figure was first provided to the Americans by SS Sturmbannführer Dr. Hoettl in spring 1945, and repeated at the IMT in Nuremberg on November 26, 1945. It must be noted, however, that this selfsame figure was demonstrably first put forth in the foreign press as early as January 4, 1945, several weeks prior to the January 27, 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp (with its alleged 4 million victims)-put about by none other than the infamous Soviet Minister of Propaganda, Ilya Ehrenburg. Thus it was Ehrenburg who came up with the figure of six million. [cf. Joachim Hoffmann, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg 1941-1945, 5th ed., Herbig, Munich 1999, pp. 182ff.; Engl.: Stalin's War of Extermination 1941-1945, Theses & Dissertations Press, Capshaw, AL, 2001, pp. 189f.]

Regarding Ehrenburg himself, it must be mentioned that in 1941 Stalin had given him the general order to incite a boundless national and racial hatred against all Germans. Ehrenburg's years-long unbridled frenzies of hatred culminated in his call to "put an end to Germany" and in an effort which he described as "modest and honorable", namely "to reduce the population of Germany", towards which end the only thing left to decide was whether it would be better "to kill the Germans with axes or with clubs".

Both examples show that new evidence can immediately overthrow something that is allegedly self-evident, and, accordingly, it is the duty of any contemporary historian to call allegedly conclusive findings into question. Even in matters involving grave charges, the principle of self-evidentness has been known to become invalidated. As an example one need only consider the claim (widely accepted in Germany in particular, but now denied by Yad Vashem itself) that the Germans had manufactured soap from the bodies of murdered Jews-a fabrication that also goes back to Soviet war propaganda. Therefore, the anthology at issue here does not commit anything unlawful, but rather engages in a justified and necessary pursuit in its attempt to critically examine allegedly self-evident issues on the basis of new evidence or findings, as it is in fact the natural task of historiography to do.

The Problem of Eyewitness Testimony

Several contributions to this anthology point out, and rightly so, that the testimony of eyewitnesses is unreliable; these contributions back their claims with numerous examples, some of which are indeed truly grotesque. Such experiences certainly agree with those of other historians of the Second World War. This is not to say that eyewitness statements are entirely superfluous, but practical experience definitely has shown that they must always be examined and corroborated with authentic documents. My personal experience has been that as early as 1970 eyewitness testimony about details of the events of the war was so unreliable that it would have been a breach of professional duties to base a historical treatise on them alone.

Benz's Anthology

On the whole, the contributions to the anthology here at issue frequently manifest a profound understanding of the subject and its associated literature, even though some suggestions made do appear questionable at times. However, the Establishment literature about the Holocaust also often contains factual errors. One example in this context is Benz's 1991 anthology Dimension des Völkermords, which displays a downright disarming ignorance of the state of affairs on the Soviet side. The authors of the Gauss anthology object, and correctly so, that Benz bases his studies uncritically on the announcements made by Soviet war propaganda and on the publications about Soviet show trials. The anthology edited by Benz attempts, by means of elaborate statistical minutiae, to prove the correctness of the six-million figure. Anyone who has worked with demographic statistics knows what serious errors can enter into such complex analyses even under a strictly objective agenda. Benz is entirely unaware that Ehrenburg had already introduced the six-million figure into the annals of war propaganda on January 4, 1945. Thus, he will have to accept the charge that, though unwittingly, he has really only worked to confirm a propaganda figure of Ehrenburg's. From this perspective, his and his co-authors' research findings offer a foothold for fundamental criticism.

Babi Yar

The mass execution of Jewish inhabitants of Kyiv, known as the massacre of Babi Yar, is also subjected to justified and necessary criticism in the anthology here at issue. Over time, the actions of Einsatzkommando 4a of the Security Police and the SD under Blobel have experienced propagandistic inflation to the point where restoring the actual facts to their real dimensions is an obligation for anyone striving for historical veracity. Of course this does not impinge on the fact that thousands of Jews were killed in Kyiv.

Overall Impression

The overall impression evoked by this anthology edited by Gauss is that its contents must be acknowledged-with critical common sense, of course-no less than is always undisputedly and unrestrictedly done with the 'official' literature about the Holocaust. The principle of audiatur et altera pars [let the other side be heard] must apply in this case as well! A suppression of this carefully documented work would represent a forcible obstruction of the legitimate striving for scientific and academic understanding. The state of knowledge is never static. Experience has shown that exaggerations and errors always grind themselves down in the course of a normal academic controversy. One must not deny a mature and free researcher and reader his ability to exercise his critical faculties. It would then be only a small step from suppressing unpopular books, to burning them; and then, though with different motivations, we would be right back where the entire misfortune began.

Conclusion

As historian officially commissioned by the Militärgeschichtliche Forschungsamt I have spent two-and-a-half decades studying the Soviet military literature about the history of the Red Army and the Second World War in its original documentary texts-an endless chain of misrepresentations, fabrications, distortions and slander. But even this historical literature turned up the occasional truths. I could not have carried out my academic duties if I had rejected the Soviet publications out-of-hand as being unacademic. The same goes infinitely more for the anthology here at issue, which is on a respectable academic level and which doubtless contributes much to our understanding of aspects of the war, despite any reservations one may have.

[sgd.] Dr. J. Hoffmann, Acad. Director (retired)

[written on September 28, 1995]

On June 15, 1996, judge Burkhardt Stein from Tübingen County Court ordered the confiscation and incineration of all books Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte and all means for its manufacturing (Ref. 4 Gs 173/95). The expert reports presented by the defense were ignored.

Since I fled my home country in early 1996, many more criminal prosecutions were started for publications I authored, edited, published, or distributed, and keep authoring, editing, publishing, and distributing. The following list contains cases where such proceedings came to my knowledge. Since distributing literature banned by the German Federal Review Office for Youth-Endangering Publications (Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften) is a criminal offense in Germany, and each confiscation of literature by a German court is accompanied automatically by criminal prosecution against those who authored, edited, published, distributed, printed, imported, exported, stored or otherwise made available the confiscated literature, each of the following cases is considered to be a crime under the tough German thought crime legislation. One must therefore assume that each of the following cases may result in at least one criminal proceeding against me. Finally, I have added a list of works published by me for which it is unknown if any criminal proceedings were started. Since the content of these publications is comparable to the other publications listed here, it must be expected that in any of these cases criminal investigations have been or will be started.

In 1994, the State Prosecution Office of Böblingen confiscated the following books written by Germar Rudolf. It is likely that Rudolf's ongoing distribution of these publications since 1994-both in printed form as well as online-led to further criminal proceedings against him (County Court Böblingen, 9 Gs 521/94):

In 1996, the County Court Munich ordered the confiscation and destruction of the issue 6/1995 of the periodical Staatsbriefe, (Castel del Monte, Munich), because of an article authored by Germar Rudolf (County Court Munich, 8440 Ds 112 Js 10161/96)[586]

In 1996, the County Court Berlin Tiergarten ordered the confiscation and destruction of the issues 2 and 3/1995 of the periodical Sleipnir, (Castel del Monte, Munich), because of an article authored by Germar Rudolf (County Court Berlin-Tiergarten, 271 Ds 155/96)[587]

During a search of his property in March 1997, the Judge Dr. Payer of County Court Böblingen orders the search of a German PO Box used by Germar Rudolf, and its formal owner, because of a prosecution launched against Germar Rudolf for disseminating revisionist literature via the Internet address www.codoh.com, where this PO Box is given as a contact address (County Court Böblingen, ref. 9(8) Gs 228/97).

In 1997, the County Court Weinheim ordered the confiscation and destruction of the book formally edited by Herbert Verbeke, but factually written and published by Germar Rudolf, Kardinalfragen zur Zeitgeschichte (Cardinal Questions of Contemporary History), Vrij Historisch Onderzoek, Berchem 1996 (County Court Weinheim, ref. 2 Ds 11 Js 5428/97)[588]

In 1997, the County Court Böblingen ordered the confiscation and destruction of the book edited by Rüdiger Kammerer, Armin Solms, and authored by Germar Rudolf, Das Rudolf Gutachten, Cromwell Press, London 1993 (County Court Böblingen, ref. 9(8) Gs 228/97)[589]

In 1997, the County Court Böblingen ordered the confiscation and destruction of the book formally edited by Herbert Verbeke, but factually edited and co-authored by Germar Rudolf under the pen names Ernst Gauss and Manfred Köhler, Auschwitz: Nackte Fakten, Vrij Historisch Onderzoek, Berchem 1996 (County Court Böblingen, ref. 9(8) Gs 228/97).[590] On April 8, 1999, the German Federal Review Office for Youth-Endangering Publications put this book on its list of prohibited literature (Bundesanzeiger No. 81, April 30, 1999)

On December 2, 1997, the German Federal Review Office for Youth-Endangering Publications informs the publisher of the journal Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung (Quarterly for free Historical Research), formally Herbert Verbeke, but factually Germar Rudolf, that it is going to put the issues one and two of the year 1997 on its list of prohibited literature.[591]

On May 12, 1998, the German Federal Review Office for Youth-Endangering Publications informs the formally responsible persons of the website www.vho.org, Herbert Verbeke, but factually and since summer 1998 even formally Germar Rudolf, that it is going to put the entire content of this website on its list of prohibited literature. (Ref. No. BPjS, Pr. 273/98 UK/Schm)[592]

On August 25, 1998, the Office of State Prosecution in Munich I informs the publisher of the journal Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung (Quarterly for free Historical Research), formally Herbert Verbeke, but factually Germar Rudolf, that criminal proceedings have been started against them for an article published in the issue 1/1998 of this journal, dealing with the ground water table in the region of the former concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau (Staatsanwaltschaft Munich I, ref. 112 Js 11282/98)[593]

On January 12, 1999, the German Federal Review Office for Youth-Endangering Publications informs the publisher of the journal Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung (Quarterly for free Historical Research), formally Herbert Verbeke, but factually Germar Rudolf, that it put the issues three and four of the year 1997 on its list of prohibited literature (Ref. No. 5490 (V)).[594]

On March 30, 1999, the County Court Munich ordered the confiscation and destruction of the issue 2/1998 of the journal Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung (Quarterly for free Historical Research), published by Germar Rudolf, and informs him that criminal proceedings were initiated against him.[595] Reason for this were mainly two articles dealing with the concentration camp Majdanek[596] and with microwave delousing facilities in the concentration camp Auschwitz[597] (County Court Munich, ref. 812 Gs 16/98).

On January 5, 2000, the German Federal Review Office for Youth-Endangering Publications informs the publisher of the book KL Majdanek. Eine historische und technische Studie (Concentration Camp Majdanek. A Historical and Technical Study) , Germar Rudolf, that it put this book on its list of prohibited literature. (Ref. 5715(V), Bundesanzeiger No. 20, Jan. 29, 2000)[598]

On April 19, 2000, the police of Baden-Württemberg confiscated and destroyed all copies available of the book Vorlesungen über Zeitgeschichte (Lectures on Contemporary History), authored by Germar Rudolf under the pen name Ernst Gauss, as ordered by the County Court Tübingen (County Court Tübingen, ref. 4 Gs 312/2000).[599]

In August 2002, a customer of mine made me aware of the fact that criminal proceedings were started against him because he had ordered ten copies of the German version of this book, Das Rudolf Gutachten, Castle Hill Publishers, Hastings 2001.[603] This means that distributing this book in Germany is considered a crime, so a criminal investigation must have been started against me because of this book.

Each of these crimes, which are doubtlessly covered by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, can be punished with up to five years in prison in Germany. Would I surrender to the German authorities, I might well face some 10 years in prison for my entirely and acknowledged scientific writings and for my internet fight against German censorship, to which I have devoted parts of my website www.vho.org, which offers all the literature banned and confiscated by German authorities, as long as it does not promote pornography or violence.[605]

When in spring 1992 Germar Rudolf sent out the first draft of his "Expert Report on the Formation and Detectability of Cyanide Compounds in the 'Gas Chambers' of Auschwitz" to a narrow circle of recipients in science and politics, several historians responded with interest. The media, however, received no notice of the existence of the report. Only in spring 1993, when retired Major General Otto Ernst Remer took a later draft of the expert report, provided it with a peppery political preface, and then sent some 1,000 to 2,000 copies to the media, public attorneys, politicians, and scientists, did a certain circle of the Establishment learn of the existence of this report.

The press was quiet, except for two short articles that appeared on May 8/9 and 13, 1993, in the Wiesbadener Kurier reporting on the embarrassment the expert report had caused to the chemical analysis Institute Fresenius hired by Rudolf, located in Taunusstein near Wiesbaden, and an announcement in the Märkische Allgemeinen of May 14, 1993, that a certain Prof. L. Bisky had filed a criminal complaint. Finally, in spring 1994, when the Labor Court heard the case between Rudolf and his former employer, the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Research at Stuttgart, which ended with a compromise, the dpa (German Press Agency) issued a press release that appeared in many newspapers and even on the radio. That prompted the ARD (German Public Broadcasting) television program Report to make a witch-hunt broadcast.

In the regional press of the Stuttgart area, where Rudolf resided at that time, there appeared mostly factual police notices, reporting that the State Security Department of the Criminal Police of Baden-Württemberg[607] for various reasons had ordered house-searches (September 30, 1993,[608] August 18, 1994,[609] and March 27, 1995[610]). However, the headlines were occasionally ridiculous. For example, the headline "Nazi book depot in Steinenbronn" appeared in the Böblinger Boten of March 29, 1995. In fact, there were neither Nazis, Nazi material nor a book depot in Rudolf's home.

The authorized version of the expert report was published in summer 1993 in Great Britain with the title Das Rudolf Gutachten and has been distributed and sold in Germany since then.[611] There has been no echo about this version in the media.

The media showed increased interest, when the 17th State Security Chamber of the Stuttgart District Court began the criminal investigation against me on account of suspicion of participation in the preparation and distribution of Remer's commented version of my report. However, they were not interested in the Expert Report nor in me, but merely in the question, whether there should be made an example "to punish the right-wing" for reasons of public instruction.

The trial proceedings did not center upon the actual contents of my expert report, but on Remer's political commentary and my (alleged) political views. This was despite the fact that prosecutions for dissenting political views are forbidden according to the German constitution (cf. article 3.3. of the German Basic law). They have a strong tendency to turn into show-trials, and this is exactly what happened in this case.

Later on, several of the media reports that were published in the course of the hubbub over the Rudolf expert report and its author attempted to critically evaluate how true-or rather how false-this expert report was.

On March 28, 1994, the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (MPG, M.-P.-Corporation), umbrella organization of some 200 Max-Planck-Institutes all over Germany and Austria-I had been a PhD student at one of them-issued a press release on my expert report. They reported on internal measures taken by my former employer, the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, against me. The MPG made it clear that since they agreed with the German Federal Constitutional Court and the Federal Supreme Court as to the commonly known fact of the Holocaust, they would not involve themselves in the discussion of the issues raised by my expert report.

The Expert Opinion of the dpa - Invented from Whole Cloth

The news release of the dpa Press Bureau Stuttgart which appeared the following day in almost all German newspapers and also on the radio contained the following passage:[612]

"According to their spokesman, the Max-Planck-Corporation has no proof that the samples are really from Auschwitz. Even if they are from there, according to expert opinion, it is certainly no wonder that no traces of hydrogen cyanide were found, because cyanide compounds disintegrate quickly. In earth this takes six to eight weeks and in stone they can only be preserved by "absolute conservation conditions, including complete exclusion of air and bacteria".

Of course, the Max-Planck-Corporation had no evidence about the origin of the samples, since they did not ask me for any and I had no reason to give them any without having been asked. This is nothing else but a clumsy diversion from the main question. And by the way: if this topic is important to anybody, no one is prevented from verifying the results of my expert report and the test results of others as discussed in chapter 8.

On inquiry about the supposed expert opinion about the instability of cyanide compounds, Albert Meinecke, the person at dpa apparently responsible for the notice, referred first to the press statement from the MPG.[613] After it was shown to Meinecke that the statement contained no comment on the factual content of the expert report, nor any comment on the stability or presence of cyanide compounds,[612] he made various claims, depending on the caller and the time of the call:

Since Meinecke had said both b) and c) in the same conversation, he was confronted with the fact that he had contradicted himself and that he must know very well who the responsible party was if he could say the person was not in the office. When asked if he had not made a great pile of goat-dung with his press notice, he opined that no one was without fault.[613]

He would call Rudolf when he knew more about who was responsible and what the source was.[613] As of January 2003, this has still not happened.

The connection between the MPG and the unnamed expert opinion created by the phraseology of the dpa notice would suggest to the reader that the expert opinion was that of the MPG. The latter declared by fax on April 12, 1994, that this was not the case and that the claim in the dpa notice was mistaken.

After two weeks of silence, on April 13, 1994, dpa Editor-in-Chief D. Ebeling of Hamburg, speaking for the agency, announced in a fax message to me that the unnamed expert would remain unnamed to protect his privacy. Two days later, in an unsigned faxed notice, A. Meinecke denied my accusation of falsehood[615] and referred me to the Editor-in-Chief in Hamburg.

The Technical Issues

Among others, the dpa notice contained the following assertion:

"Even if they [the samples] are from there [Auschwitz], according to expert opinion, it is certainly no wonder that no traces of hydrogen cyanide were found, because cyanide compounds disintegrate quickly."

Evidently the writer of these lines does not know the difference between hydrogen cyanide and cyanide compounds. If he should wish to subsume cyanide compounds under hydrogen cyanide, which might make it easier for the layman to understand, then it is clear: This sentence and the following one discuss the stability of cyanide compounds, the only thing that makes sense with respect to the Rudolf Report. The question as to the stability of hydrogen cyanide itself, as raised by Ebeling in his fax to me, is of no concern to anyone[616]-the question is a useless diversion from the subject.

The supposed statements of the unknown expert assert that cyanide compounds disintegrate quickly. This blanket claim is and will always be untenable and shameful for any expert to make. As proof for this, the reader may simply go back to chapter 6.6. of this book, and there in particular to chapter 6.6.5. (page 177).

Ebeling's assertions that stable compounds may form but do not necessarily form[615] needs no confirmation from competent authority, since the fact that every acid in the world forms stable as well as unstable compounds is as trivial as an 'Amen' in church.

In the dpa notice it was stated that cyanide compounds will last in stone only under "absolute conservation conditions", but in contrast to that, in the masonry of the cases of interest here and investigated in detail in this report, the disinfestation chambers of Auschwitz, hydrogen cyanide formed extremely long-lasting iron cyanide compounds of the Iron Blue type. See the arguments given above for proof of this.

Wrong is therefore not only the claim of the dpa press release that this statement stemmed from an expert, but the actual content of this release is absolutely untenable. No expert would have endorsed such a embarrassingly absurd statement. It is not hard to see why the person responsible for having released this article did not want to be named, as Herr Ebeling said.

Report

Portrait: Incitement to Hatred

One of the main incidents of the witch-hunt against Germar Rudolf was the left-wing Report broadcast of the German public TV station ARD on April 11, 1994. In the footage by Stefan Rocker, everyone from Conservative to neo-Nazi personalities, including Germar Rudolf, were thrown all together into one pot. By this sort of undifferentiated reporting, one can produce in certain sectors of the German population a pogrom mood against everything which is or might be right-wing. Report showed pictures of a synagogue in Lübeck which had been fire-bombed just a few months before, using the words, that as soon as Auschwitz denial would boom again, synagogues would be burning. The next picture shown in this footage was that of Germar Rudolf on his way to the Labor Court in Stuttgart. Thereby, Herr Rudolf was made into a sort of paper accomplice of the Lübeck arson. This was strengthened by the commentator's choice of words, when he mentioned the title of the well-known play Biedermann und die Brandstifter (Everyman and the Arsonist).[617]

If that does not constitute criminal incitement of the German television-viewing audience against Germar Rudolf, what would? It goes without saying that reports of this kind are loaded with pictures of concentration camps, deported Jews, and a sea of corpses in order to ridicule the supposed denial claim of a Germar Rudolf. This is the way the left-wing Report works.

But which viewer would know that Rudolf had not only not denied, but had actually denounced the frequent injustices that did occurred at that time?[618] And who would notice that the pictures proved nothing except that thousands in the concentration camps died from sickness and malnutrition? Who noticed that no TV program ever showed a film or a picture of a 'gas chamber' either in operation or capable of being put into operation-the only point in which Germar Rudolf holds a different viewpoint from media outfits such as Report?

Report spewed falsehoods and lies into the world. One of them was seized upon by Franziska Hundseder in her book Rechte machen Kasse (Righ-wingers Cash In) and will be dealt with in the next section. Here I will discuss another:[619]

In the appendix of his expert report under the heading Danksagung (Acknowledgements), Rudolf had thanked a number of persons and institutions who had helped him in many ways in the collection of data or sources, the recovery and analysis of samples, or for any assistance in the production of the report. Among these were the firms DEGUSSA AG and Institute Fresenius, since the first had supplied important technical data on the stability of Iron Blue and the second had analyzed most of the samples in Rudolf's presence and initially with his help. Such acknowledgements are usual in scientific publications-also they are polite.

In their commentary, Report reproached Rudolf that he had used the names of well-known institutes and firms to give his report the appearance of competence. In view of the facts just given, this reproach is both malevolent and ridiculous. Report's additional assertion that a criminal complaint for fraud had been filed against Rudolf due to this misuse of well-known names, was pure invention. Up to today, January 2003, there have been no criminal complaints from any of the persons or institutions directly or indirectly involved in the production of the report. Report's false accusation was a direct smear.

Stefan Rocker also participated in an ARD-Tagesthemen news broadcast on June 6, 1996, covering the book-burning trial of the book Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte,[620] edited by Rudolf, then before the County Court of Tübingen. A written version of this piece appeared in FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) of June 10, 1996, p. 14. It began with the following sentence:

"Everyman and the Arsonist: diplom chemist German[621] Rudolf, 31, was sentenced to 14 months imprisonment by the Stuttgart District Court a year ago for incitement to racial hatred and denial of the holocaust."

Rudolf was also accused of having published a "pseudo-scientific" "hack-job" titled Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte, whereby he had proven himself a repetitious right-wing extremist offender. It was stated he had left the country and was sought by the police.

The fact that 100 academics had placed an advertisement in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung during the book-burning trial[622] which criticized the use of censorship and the violation of civil rights by German courts was termed a "frontal assault on the Federal German justice system" in this commentary. Throughout that piece, the authors threw everyone who was politically right-of-center into one big brown bucket.

Ripple Effects

In mid-May 1995, the left-wing political TV show Panorama (again from the German public station ARD) reported on several medium-size businesses that had become known as supporters of right-wing circles.[623] This broadcast was a cinematic presentation of the book Rechte machen Kasse,[624] (Right-Wingers Cash In) written by the journalist who produced the broadcast, Franziska Hundseder. In the book, the author discusses Germar Rudolf or his expert report twice. Both times her discussion is full of errors and falsehoods.

For example, in referring to the invented dpa press release about the alleged instability of cyanide compounds, Frau Hundseder concludes:

"Therefore, this so-called expert report of Herr Rudolf-like the expert report of Frederick A. Leuchter, which similarly found no traces of cyanide in the walls of Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria 1 and 2-contains no proof of anything other than the methods by which right-wing extremists conduct historical research."

Though notified in writing about the falsity of the dpa press release she was relying upon, Frau Hundseder never changed her position on this. The same is true for a passage on page 212 of her book, where she claims I had tried to collect several tens of thousands of deutschmarks in order to buy copies of the death books of the Auschwitz camp. She gives the impression that I was trying to get the money. But this is not true. The letter quoted by her had already been distortedly quoted by the above mentioned Report journalists who must have illegally received a complete copy of this letter from the trial record. However, if read completely, the letter reveals that I did not want any money, but was asking several personalities to donate money to a third person I had no personal connection with.

The Verdict a Foregone Conclusion

As the trial against Germar Rudolf in the State Security Chamber of the District Court of Stuttgart began at the end of November 1994, there were several media individuals who distinguished themselves by their painful ignorance of the subject matter of the trial. The cause for this seemed to be that no journalist deemed it necessary to ask for information from anyone involved in the trial. So it happened that repeatedly items were misunderstood or misreported. One might not attribute purposeful distortion to the journalists if it were not for the fact that these misunderstandings were always decidedly unfavorable to Rudolf.

The partisan orientation of the Süddeutscher Rundfunk, SDR, another public broadcasting station (almost all German public broadcasting stations are left-wing oriented) was exposed when it decided to report only one side of the story, namely that of the investigating police officer.

Since his statements were apparently not critical enough for the SDR, soon items were invented. The SDR took the only two statements from the several hundred pages of correspondence in which Rudolf had mentioned two Jewish personalities in a disapproving way, which were cited by the police officer. SDR then asserted falsely, the officer had characterized the rest of my correspondence "as the vilest incitement and defamation". The SDR also attributed to the police officer that he had understood Rudolf to have said he wanted to "rewrite the history of Germany from 1871 onward, without the Holocaust or World War II", which in view of the absurdity of the statement may cause doubt about the sanity of the journalists involved. And of course, the SDR was silent on the substantial mitigating evidence presented by the defense in the following months.[625]

With a few exceptions, the entire media was silent until the end of the trial. It could be seen from the behavior of the journalists present that they were not looking for the real story, but were intent on bringing in a sacrifice for the Zeitgeist: all but one of them-a new person from Südwestfunk radio-resorted only to the prosecuting attorneys and judges in their search for information.

The Stuttgarter Zeitung (StZ) provides a clear example of the tendentious method of reporting used by the media. Since not enough incriminating material turned up in the several thousand pages of Rudolf's correspondence that were found in the first house search in September 1993, on January 27, 1995, the StZ conjured up "writing in the hand of the accused with indisputable [...] xenophobic content". However, in the whole trial there was never any talk of xenophobia or racism, because there was never any basis for same. At the end of a piece of the Landesschau of Südwest 3 TV station on December 27, 1994, the Christian-Conservative Rudolf mutated into a neo-Nazi: the trial against Rudolf was characterized as another case of a neo-Nazi in the Stuttgart District Court, following a real trial against several National Socialists that had taken place in the same court a short time before.[626]

That the verdict was assumed to have been decided before the fact became more and more noticeable as the question was raised whether there would be difficulties in convicting Rudolf of the crime he was accused of, as if it were not the task of the court to determine the truth without respect to party, but rather that it should find guilt whether or not the crime had been committed.

The Böblinger Kreiszeitung reported in this vein on May 10, 1995, as the trial was nearing its end. There, on page 13 under the headline "Sentence Before Pentecost", one found:

"He [the presiding judge] believes that the prosecuting attorney will conclude her case at the next session on May 18 of this year, and that the sentence against the chemist will be handed down before Pentecost unless something unforeseen happens."

How can it be that, according to this press report, the presiding judge can announce before the end of the trial (it ended on June 23, 1995) that the expected judgment will be against the accused, that it will be decided to his disadvantage? It would have made sense to state that the judgment will be given in a case or about the accused. If the journalist here reported the presiding judge's words correctly, the choice of words shows the partisanship of the judge; otherwise it shows that of the journalist.

It is worthwhile to note the relative emphasis the media gave to the pleadings of the prosecution as opposed to that of the defense. On June 13, 1995, the StZ reported the arguments of the public attorney in a detailed 3-column story on page 2, while the defense appearance was covered the following day in a small single-column story which merely recapitulated the events of the trial and did not report any of the arguments of the accused.

To be fair, it should be mentioned that after the sentence came down on June 24, 1995, Sonnhild Maier, the journalist for the StZ, mentioned some of the defense arguments:

"The court ruled that the expert report and the preface were a single work and were to be seen as a 'common production' of Rudolf and Remer.

This is what the accused chemist vehemently disputed. He is a practicing Catholic, believes in the political order of the Federal Republic and would never have entered into an association with Remer, whom he took to be a 'living political fossil'. In the chemist's words: 'I would not have been so stupid-this would have undermined me in the final phase of my doctoral program'.[627]At the time he was preparing his doctoral thesis at the Max-Planck-Institute in Stuttgart. When his expert report became publicly known, he lost his job."

In a 3-column story on June 14, 1995, the Stuttgarter Nachrichten summarized the prosecution case. The story gave the defense's claims responding to the prosecution's points, but not a single argument supporting these claims. Instead of this, the defense arguments were superficially refuted by the journalist Frank Schwaibold using somewhat erroneous counterarguments.

Against the assertion of the prosecution that Rudolf had revealed himself as a politically motivated criminal by his work under the pseudonym Ernst Gauss and therefore deserved no probation, the defense objected that the Gauss case could not be applied. It was hidden from the reader that in a state under the rule of law an accused can not be disadvantaged through a court case that had not even started. In response to the defense counterargument to the prosecution charge that Rudolf cooperated with Remer, journalist Frank Schwaibold asserted falsely that Rudolf had met and talked with Remer three times. The truth is that Rudolf and Remer met only by chance in the course of Rudolf's work as expert witness for Remer's defense attorney. During these accidental encounters, there was no conversation between them, which even the court acknowledged.[628]

Against the defense assertion that the accused was no neo-Nazi, the journalist cited a letter absurdly out of context in which Rudolf "referred to the 'Jew Republic Germany' in context with the person Ignatz Bubis". In that letter,[629] Rudolf criticized a proposal made in spring 1993 that Ignatz Bubis be elected Federal German President. Taking into consideration that Bubis had almost no political experience at that time but had a criminal past, Rudolf commented that the proposal reflected the immense importance that was given to him as the leader of a diminishing minority in the German state (the late Ignatz Bubis was head of the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland, Central Council of Jews in Germany, at that time). For that reason, Rudolf stated that it was appropriate to rename the name of the German nation, using this minority as a prefix: Judenrepublik Deutschland (Jew Republic of Germany).[630] The Jewish witness Horst Lummert, who testified on behalf of Germar Rudolf, confirmed before the court on January 9, 1995, that this reasoning was justified.[631]

Given these facts, it remains for Frank Schwaibold to explain to us where neo-Nazism is hidden in Rudolf's remarks.

Execution by Media

Naturally, after the announcement of the sentence of the District Court of Stuttgart, according to which Rudolf was to be punished with 14 months imprisonment without probation, the media found it easy to drag Germar Rudolf through the mud. The first was the Süddeutscher Rundfunk. Following the imperative of the Zeitgeist, without making use of the decision of the court or any other evidence, it labeled Rudolf a "neo-Nazi". It also attempted to make the Rudolf expert report ridiculous by resurrecting the dpa notice from a year before. SDR 3 simply claimed that it was known to competent chemists that cyanide compounds disintegrate within a few weeks in rocks.[632]

The program Landesschau of the regional television station Südwest 3 made comments similar to those of SDR 3, but piled even further on the defamation by misrepresenting an article that appeared in the Stuttgarter Nachrichten the week before. This article of June 14, 1995, was entitled "Only a Victim of the 'Father-figure of Neo-Nazism'?". Under the Word "Neo-Nazism," a picture of the accused was shown. The question raised by this newspaper headline was whether Rudolf had been a victim of O. E. Remer, who was identified as the "Father-figure of Neo-Nazism".

In filming a copy of this article, the Südwestfunk bent the paper so that the viewer would see only the words "Father-figure of Neo-Nazism" over the photograph of Rudolf. The viewer would unavoidably receive the impression that the harsh sentence on Rudolf was a judicial determination that with Rudolf one was dealing with the father-figure of Neo-Nazism. It is difficult to imagine how media distortion could get any worse.

Many media sources considered the sentence handed down by the court as an insufficient condemnation of Rudolf, as can be seen from several examples. On June 24, 1995, the Böblinger Bote wrote that Rudolf could be linked to National Socialist race doctrine. This complete fabrication is so absurd and so far from any reality that it was never an issue during the course of the trial, nor was it mentioned in the court's spoken opinion giving the basis for the written verdict. Unfortunately, this did not hinder the court from inserting this unfounded assertion into the written verdict for the sentence.[633]

On the same day, and despite Rudolf's personal appeal, Frank Schwaibold of the Stuttgarter Nachrichten could not help but once again misconstrue the contacts between Rudolf and Remer, in that he wrote, Rudolf had been "provably in personal contact with Remer three times", where the word "personal" imputed a relationship between the two that had never existed.

On June 24, 1995, the Süddeutsche Zeitung outdid itself in manipulating the news. It wrote that Rudolf had occasionally been a member of the right-wing extremist Republican Party. But, in fact, Rudolf had been a member of the party at a time when it was not considered "right-wing extremist" and even important members of the semi-conservative Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) maintained contacts with members of the party. Whatever opinion the media and the German internal secret service, the Office for the Defense of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz) had after Rudolf left the party in summer 1991 cannot be taken as a criterion for the evaluation of Rudolf's political views. Also, Rudolf was not on trial for his political beliefs, which, according to Article 3, Para. 3 of the German Basic Law can never be cause for deprivation of rights. Finally, it is absurd to try to associate the patriotic-conservative views of the Republicans with the National Socialist views of Remer, which was clearly the intention of the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung also was the only one of Germany's bigger daily newspapers that again trotted out the fable of the supposedly long-ago refuted Rudolf expert report, based on the dpa notice:

"According to information from competent chemists, hydrogen cyanide compounds disintegrate within a few months from the effects of weather and are no longer detectable."

With this perpetual falsehood, the point was made to every uninitiated reader that the Rudolf expert report was the technically worthless hack-job of an incompetent chemist. At the beginning of the trial on November 23, 1994, the Böblinger Bote had spread the same nonsense:

"According to expert opinion, no traces of cyanide can be found after 50 years since they disintegrate quickly."

In their report of 1997, p. 64, even the Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bayerisches Amt für Verfassungsschutz) has the nerve to repeat that nonsense.

In view of the supposedly proven pseudo-science in the Rudolf expert report, the newspapers avoided the words "expert report" or printed them in quotation marks and also characterized it as a "hack-job" (StZ, November 23, 1994). However, on that date, November 23, 1994, the court declared that it did not consider itself competent to decide to what extent the expert report satisfied scientific criteria. It avoided the issue of scientific evidence by attributing to Rudolf the preface and epilogue written by Remer's friend in Remer's version and sentenced Rudolf on that basis.

In a wider context, Hans Westra, Director of the Anne Frank Foundation in the Netherlands, has commented on the technical correctness of the Rudolf expert report. The Anne Frank Foundation is one of the most well-known of the institutions world-wide that occupy themselves with uncovering and documenting proofs of the Holocaust. In response to the question of a journalist as to whether the scientific conclusions of the Rudolf expert report were correct, Hans Westra replied:[634]

"These scientific analyses are perfect. What one cannot determine is how this Rudolf got them, how he obtained the samples."

Certainly Mr. Westra could not restrain himself from casting doubt on the authenticity of the samples, since established researchers seem to be able to find no other loop-hole in the scheme of arguments in the Rudolf expert report.

News for Public Instruction

The day of the announcement of the sentence in the case of Germar Rudolf may be the only one in which the media outside the local region reported on it. As mentioned above, the Süddeutsche Zeitung devoted an extensive story to the sentence.

Also, on June 23, 1995, the nationwide TV news show heute of the ZDF (German public Television 2) felt called on to write a short story reporting that the diplom chemist Germar Rudolf had been sentenced to 14 months imprisonment without probation on account of an expert report on the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Since as the media outside the local region had reported almost nothing on the case previous to this, the normal television viewer would hardly know what to do with this very brief piece of information. Therefore, the report can have had only one purpose: It should be made clear to every potential technical witness Republic-wide that those who voice views about the Holocaust complex that deviate from those officially allowed-however factually correct, reputable, scientific and perhaps even professionally correct-will be thrown in jail without probation.

The news reports of the local press on May 6, 1996, ran in the same direction after my application for a revision of the verdict was turned down by the German Federal Supreme Court. They hinted to the reader that the scientist Rudolf had been sentenced because of his expert report, which had come to an incorrect conclusion and thereby denied the Holocaust. It apparently did not interest anyone that the expert report had not been an issue at the trial. Naturally, the Böblinger Bote could not restrain itself from digging up the dpa lie again:[635]

"In opposition to competent scientific authorities, the Jettingen chemist asserted that mass-killing of humans with hydrogen cyanide would leave traces of cyanide in the masonry of the remaining buildings in the camp, but no such traces can be found."

That the extremely harsh sentence against Rudolf was due to reasons of public instruction, and thus for the purpose of frightening any scientist who might play with the idea of publishing a deviating opinion (general prevention), was also the opinion of the Böblinger Bote on June 27, 1996:

"No probation was granted for the sentence of 14 months imprisonment handed down in June last year on grounds of general prevention."

Hunted Abroad

In March of 1996, Germar Rudolf went into exile. The press initially lost track of him and for the time being, lost interest as well. This changed in the fall of 1999, when British journalist Chris Hastings (34) set about tracking him down in England. Since Rudolf had registered, as required by law, and residency records are open to the public, it was not difficult to establish that Rudolf was residing in England. In addition, Rudolf had listed his post office address on his website (PO Box 118, Hastings TN34 3ZQ.) Chris Hastings succeeded in locating the apartment in which Rudolf was registered. He left a note requesting an interview. Rudolf granted his request by allowing him a two hour interview at Victoria station in London. The content of this interview concerned primarily the present state of human rights in Germany as well as the official persecution of Rudolf. But as Rudolf suspected, Hastings was not interested in the present state of human rights in Germany. In Hastings' article in the Sunday Telegraph of Oct. 17, 1999, the subject was not even mentioned. Instead, under a subtitle demagogically slandering Rudolf as a "neo-nazi", Hastings wrote:[636]

"He [Rudolf] confirms that, during his stay in Britain, he has forged links with far-Right extremists including members of the National Front and the British National Party.[...]

'In Britain I work as an Holocaust revisionist 24 hours a day. My work has brought me into contact with people on the far Right. I have met leading members of the National Front and the British National Party while I have been in England.'"

In the worst tradition of yellow journalism, Hastings took individual words and phrases totally out of context and rearranged them to suit his sensationalistic purposes. Rudolf never uttered such sentences, with the exception of the sentence about working 24 hours a day for revisionism. It is a fact that, in the spring of 1999, Rudolf met with Nick Griffin and discussed Griffin's experiences with the British justice system. The year before, Griffin was, among other things, accused of having published an article with revisionist statements in a small right-wing periodical edited by himself, but he had been acquitted. Because of Rudolf's own exposed position, and because he had extensively reported on official censorship in his publication Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung (VffG) before, Rudolf was naturally very interested in Griffin's story, but he was not interested in Griffin's organizational memberships or functions. Before this meeting, Rudolf was not aware that Griffin held a leading position in the nationalist British National Party. However, during the meeting, Griffin informed him that he aspired to chairmanship of the party, to which position he was subsequently elected. When asked by Hastings whether he was in contact with members of the political right, Rudolf straightforwardly told him of the conversation with Griffin. Hastings used this to suggest to his readers that Rudolf had forged contacts with the organizational leadership of the leading rightwing extremist parties of England. But to the best of his knowledge, Rudolf has never made contact with any member of the National Front.

Hastings went so far as to interview Rudolf's former landlady, whom he absurdly quoted as follows:

"Sheila Evans, Rudolf's former landlady, said: 'I remember he said he was a writer working for journals in Germany. I was struck by how clean he left the house when he left. He stripped it bare. I think he was trying to cover his tracks.'"

In fact, when he negotiated the tenancy contract in July 1996, Rudolf had told his landlady that he will write for a German periodical. (VffG first appeared in spring of 1997, published by the Flemish organization Vrij Historisch Onderzoek[637]). Mrs. Evans was the most ferocious house-dragon that Rudolf ever met. When Rudolf moved out, he had to repair and repaint every little scratch on the skirting boards, every bit of chipped enamel on door frames and heaters, every tiny dent in the walls before she would return his deposit. Surely it was normal behavior for Rudolf to take his belongings with him when he moved out. It seems that when people read about their neighbors in the newspapers, they see ghosts and goblins everywhere.

Chris Hastings continued to make Rudolf's presence and activities known to a very large number of nosy and peculiar people. He prompted them to agree that England needs a law to protect holocaust lore against scientific examination. And he prompted them to agree that Rudolf should be extradited to Germany immediately.

The results were not long in coming. The established media in Germany ground out another sensationalistic story. "Indicted Neo-nazi in Great Britain", blared the dpa (German Press Agency) on October 18, 1999 (it was printed on the 19th in Rheinpfalz and other places.) "Holocaust denier hiding out in England" announced the leftwing Stuttgarter Nachrichten on October 21, page 4. On October 31, Chris Hastings jubilantly announced in the Sunday Telegraph that Germany would now seriously pursue Rudolf's extradition. He predicted that England would comply because Rudolf had not been convicted for holocaust denial, but for incitement to racial hatred, which is a violation of English law, too.[638] On October 22, the local press in Hastings, where Rudolf resided, chimed in with "Fleeing neo-nazi uses base in Hastings" (The Hastings and St. Leonards Observer). The monthly English manhunter tabloid Searchlight joined the hunt in December with "Auschwitz liar hides out in Britain" on page 13.[639] Chris Hastings added more wood to the flames in his update of January 16, 2000: "Neo-nazi accused of 'racial hatred' goes on the run [...] Germany has issued an international arrest warrant for Germar Rudolf, who fled to England to escape a prison sentence for inciting racial hatred."

The manhunt turned completely into hysteria with a BBC report about Rudolf on March 28, 2000, which was repeated the day after by the south English regional TV station ITV. Six or seven photographs of Rudolf were shown during the report which had been taken from Rudolf's website www.vho.org. The public was warned to beware of this "nazi sympathizer". The audience must have gained the impression that Rudolf was so dangerous that he was running around murdering people. Mr. Michael Whine of the British Jewish Board of Deputies was pleased to appear before the cameras and announce that regarding Rudolf, England was dealing with a "new breed of dangerous nazis". The local press chimed in once more with "Escaped Neo-nazi still hiding in Hastings [...] he [...] was still being hunted." (The Hastings and St. Leonards Observer, March 31, 2000). Obviously, the powers that be are striving to familiarize the local populace with Rudolf's likeness and condition them to be afraid of him. It wants them to complain to the police about the desperado in their midst.

On May 27, 2000, Günther Hoerbst of the Hamburger Abendblatt reported on a report of the Israeli university of Tel Aviv entitled "Anti-Semitism Worldwide 1998/99":

"Twelve pages of the report are dedicated to Germany. The report complains about the growing acceptance of the holocaust lie, primarily by means of the internet and rightwing extremist groups. The report acknowledges that present German legislation provides the most 'advanced and effective attempts at combating the holocaust lie', but 'it nevertheless is a growing phenomenon'. For instance, the leading German holocaust liar Rudolf continues to disseminate his writings over the internet from foreign countries, even though he has been convicted and sentenced in Germany."

What a pity that is!

So far, the only more or less impartial article about Rudolf has appeared on January 7, 2000, in the Los Angeles Times, in connection with the Irving vs. Lipstadt trial. It was written by Kim Murphy.[640]

Freedom of the Press = A Truthful Press?

Against several of the above-mentioned media pieces, namely those where the person of Germar Rudolf himself had been attacked, it would have been possible to demand a right of reply in the press. However, with respect to factually false assertions such as the fabricated dpa notice which did not touch Rudolf personally, there can be no recourse under current law.

The District Court of Stuttgart sentenced Germar Rudolf to 14 months imprisonment without probation for the reasons that Rudolf was deeply marked with anti-Semitism, that he was entangled in a revisionist and right-wing extremist environment, and that he was obviously a fanatical, politically motivated criminal. In that moment, the court gave the media license to vilify and malign Germar Rudolf without let or hindrance, since in the Federal Republic of Germany, anyone labeled as an anti-Semite or right-wing extremist is a de facto outlaw. That the court did not find that Rudolf was a right-wing extremist, merely that he had had dealings with supposedly "right-wing extremist" persons, was of secondary importance and in view of the media practice of imputing guilt by association no cause to hold back. Rudolf's applications for rebuttal in the press were denied out-of-hand, since in the meantime the version of the story spread by the press had been confirmed by the courts.

In a democracy, the people are the sovereign. Should the voice of the people become the voice of God not only with respect to power, but also partly with respect to infallibility, care must be taken that the people are comprehensively and truthfully informed. In this modern information age, the media play the central role in forming the public will. For this reason, it must be guaranteed that the people are comprehensively and truthfully informed.

The intentional presentation of false and one-sided information to the public must automatically lead to false conceptions of reality and thence to unwise political decisions. The intentional presentation of disinformation through suppression of news or spreading of false news should be considered one of the most serious crimes of a political nature that can be committed in a democracy.

The question of the executive and judicial means by which the people can be guaranteed to be kept comprehensively and truthfully informed is bound to be a difficult one in view of the fundamental freedoms of press and speech. It would be necessary to require, for example, that the media be subject to democratic control in that the formation of political or economic monopolies would be prevented. One proposal would be to allow access to the media in their area of operations to political parties proportional to the vote they received or to socially-concerned organizations (such as religions) proportional to their membership, without a limiting minimum percent.

Also the right of reply in the press should be expanded such that it should apply not only when a person's reputation is harmed, but also when it can be shown that a news item is grossly one-sided or wrong, and that the truth itself has been harmed.

The criminal prosecution of persons of whom it can be proven that they deliberately composed and distributed false information is problematic, since the proof of the assertion that a journalist deliberately spread false news-that he lied-could only rarely succeed. The simple assertion that the journalist must have known that his report was not true since all others knew it should never suffice.[641]

After all, I think we do not need laws to censor liars, but laws that punish censors. That alone can be a remedy for the escalating censorship in modern Europe.

"Thank heaven, we live under the rule of law. But unfortunately, that does not apply to the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany."

In antiquity and in the Middle Ages, many European nations possessed the legal power to disfranchise citizens for gross misdeeds. With the rise of secularized constitutional nations, the use of this power disappeared until it resurfaced in the 3rd Reich as Thought-crime Laws. In the Federal Republic of Germany, the possibility of far-reaching revocations of civil rights was built right into the constitution in Article 18 of the Basic Law, but until recently no use was made of it. Jochen Lober has shown that the equivalent curtailment of the civil rights of citizens has been achieved by extra-constitutional regulation.[643] We will examine here Lober's question, whether a form of de facto outlawry was introduced with the revision of section 130 of the German Penal Code, which made any kind of Holocaust denial-or revisionism-and opposition to multi-culturalism a potential criminal offense punishable by up to five years in prison. This will be done by studying the fate of Auschwitz researcher Diplom-Chemist Germar Rudolf. What happened to him will be examined phenomenologically, not chronologically, in order to focus on the effects of German criminal law on the civil rights of German citizens.

First Step: Denunciation

From September 20 to 22, 1991, a seminar took place in Nuremberg (Bavaria) on Holocaust revisionism, sponsored by the libertarian Bavarian Thomas Dehler Foundation.

Among the participants, besides Germar Rudolf, there was a certain Diplom-Physicist Hermann Körber from Bünde. north Germany. His behavior during the seminar was highly unpleasant. During a discussion period, for example, he stated that the German people should not only be considered as murderers, but as plunderers as well. He also suggested that the Germans themselves were to blame for the many deaths among old people, women and children that were caused by the Allied aerial bombardment, because they had started the bombing (which is not true) and had knowingly failed to evacuate the civil population (which was also not true, since many children were sent to the country). During the Sunday dinner, Körber threatened a fellow participant sitting at his table with a dinner knife because the person did not share his opinion on the Holocaust, and at the close on Sunday afternoon, he loudly called the participants Germar Rudolf and Winfried Zwerenz pigs, because they had disagreed with him on scientific grounds.

On November 5, 1992, this Hermann Körber filed a criminal complaint with State Attorney Baumann in Schweinfurt against Germar Rudolf for instigating Otto Ernst Remer to incitement to racial hatred.[644] He claimed that it was Rudolf and his expert report that had caused Remer to begin publishing material on the Holocaust in his Remer Depesche (Remer Dispatches).[645] Subsequently, the state attorney of Schweinfurt initiated a criminal investigation against Rudolf on grounds of incitement to racial hatred, and others, in which O. E. Remer was also named.[646] Both accused denied the accusations.

Then, on April, 19, 1993, at the state attorney's office in Bielefeld, Körber filed a witness affidavit in which he stated:[647]

"As a Diplom Chemist, Rudolf knows and must know that his theses are scientifically untenable.

It can be proven that that which Rudolf convinced Remer of is trickery."

On April 27, 1993, as proof of his assertion that Rudolf was knowingly deceitful, Körber filed another affidavit in which he interpreted Rudolf's technical arguments made in an exchange of correspondence with Werner Wegner, as incitement to racial hatred, and characterized Rudolf's assertion that unambiguous technical evidence was superior to ambiguous documentary evidence as "unscientific and unprofessional procedure".[648]

In another affidavit made on April 30, 1993, Körber asserted falsely that Rudolf supported

"the Leuchter thesis that there was a danger of explosion throughout the Auschwitz compound, at least for structures, whenever gassing operations with Zyklon B were going on."

Rudolf had in fact stated that the use of high concentrations of Zyklon B to reduce execution periods to minutes or seconds, as the witnesses had reported, would mean that there would be safety problems due to explosive concentrations of hydrogen cyanide.[649] He had never spoken nor written of a general danger of explosion.

The busy witness Körber was at it again on May 26, 1993, this time to assert that the references to the Rudolf Report in various editions of the Remer Depesche proved that the author Rudolf was the cause. Körber also claimed that Rudolf's attempt to testify as an expert witness, which was refused by the court, constituted conspiracy to commit perjury.[650] On June 7, 1993, he repeated his accusations that Rudolf had instigated Remer to his misdeeds in the Remer Depesche, and offered evidence that would defer the possible termination of the investigation.[651]

It should be pointed out that there is no mention among Körber's statements of the fact that Germar Rudolf had written him a lengthy letter in January 1993, in which Rudolf presented detailed arguments supporting the conclusions of his report.[652] Körber had never answered the letter. His only response had been to make false accusations about Rudolf to the police.

In mid-April 1993, the state attorney of Stuttgart set in motion another prosecution against Germar Rudolf in addition to the ongoing prosecution concerning incitement. This one was initiated by retired Generalmajor O. E. Remer's distribution of a commented version of the Rudolf Report.

The first copies of Remer's version were sent to various notable personalities in politics, justice, and science on April 16, 1993.[653] On the same day, Prof. Dr. Hanns F. Zacher, President of the Max-Planck-Corporation (MPG), received a call from the Chairman of the Directorate of the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany), Ignatz Bubis, in which Herr Bubis told Prof. Zacher of his concern about the effect of the Rudolf Report by Diplom-Chemist Germar Rudolf, at that time an MPG employee.[654] It is not known what Prof. Zacher did in response to the call. In any case there was no attempt by the MPG administration to terminate Rudolf's employment at that time.

In mid-May 1993, Rudolf received at his office two calls from journalists (the German weekly magazine stern and the private TV station SAT 1) dealing with the distribution of the Remer version. During one of these calls, a colleague of Rudolf was in the room. The colleague later told another colleague, Jörg Sassmannshausen, who immediately reported the event to the executive Director of the Max-Planck-Institute, Prof. Arndt Simon.[655] Subsequently, Germar Rudolf was asked not to appear at the Institute anymore unless at the explicit request of his doctoral supervisor, Prof. Dr. H. G. von Schnering, in order to make sure that there might be no further contact with journalists during work hours. His employment contract had not been mentioned.

This request was subsequently repeated in writing. Nine days afterwards, Rudolf entered the Max-Planck-Institute in order to copy some documents and to discuss the reproduction of his doctoral thesis with his doctoral supervisor. He deliberately avoided his office in order to avoid being confronted with questions from the media. Rudolf was seen by Institute workers, however, and they reported his presence to the executive director.

Second Step: Professional Ruin

Rudolf had neglected to ask his doctoral supervisor for permission to enter the Institute. The following day he was asked to accept termination of his employment contract without notice.[656] The justification for this was primarily that Rudolf had sent letters on stationary with the Max-Planck-Institute letterhead while working on the Report. Rudolf had privately engaged the Fresenius Institute to analyze the wall samples from Auschwitz for traces of cyanide. But when the Fresenius Institute was already working on his samples in Rudolf's presence, he handed in a letter typed on a letter head of his employer with a detailed specification of the work to be conducted by the Fresenius Institute and a detailed description of the samples. Though the unauthorized use of official letterheads for private purposes was widespread at the Max-Planck-Institute at the time, in Rudolf's case it became a no-no. It was this use of Institute letterhead, about which the management of the Institute first became aware through news reports,[657] that established the connection of the Institute with the Rudolf Report.

Apparently because of the failure of the MPG to respond to the intercession of I. Bubis (see above), on June 22, 1993, the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany) felt it necessary to notify the President of the MPG that he was expected to take appropriate measures to restrict the activities of Report researcher Germar Rudolf. On July 14, 1993, the President of the MPG informed the Central Council that the MPG had no further responsibility for the activities of Herr Rudolf, since he had been fired.

The subsequent labor court proceeding instituted by Rudolf against the Max-Planck-Institute with respect to his termination without notice turned on the question, whether the generally-practiced and in his case already known infraction "private use of official letterhead" could be used as grounds for dismissal without notice when the Auschwitz issue was mixed in. Labor court judge Stolz made it clear that an employer could dismiss an employee anytime who held such views as the plaintiff Germar Rudolf. This amounts to the principle that Rudolf and others who think like him are outlaws with respect to the labor law. For reasons of social concern, the Max-Planck-Institute offered to make an agreement with the plaintiff out of court, by which the termination without notice would be revoked and at the same time replaced by a mutual agreement that the employment contract would be terminated, barring further recourse.[658]

Despite this dispute between Rudolf and his now former employer, his doctoral supervisor Prof. H. G. von Schnering continued to support his doctoral candidate and in July 1993 certified that Rudolf possessed the necessary professional and ethical qualification to take the next step, the final examination called the Rigorosum. In that month, Rudolf submitted to the University of Stuttgart his doctoral thesis with all necessary supporting documents and applied for admission to the Rigorosum. By fall 1993, however, permission for the promotion had still not been granted. On inquiry at the University, Rudolf was told that his application had been put on hold because of the criminal investigation initiated against Rudolf for incitement to racial hatred as well as that against O. E. Remer for distribution of Remer's version of the Rudolf Report. The University of Stuttgart maintained that it was questionable whether the candidate possessed the necessary ethical qualification.

The grounds for this decision was section 4 of the Law On Academic Degrees, enacted by Adolf Hitler in 1939 and still in force in Germany today. By this provision, an academic degree can be revoked or withheld, if one does not possess the necessary ethical qualification. According to a decision of the Administrative Court of Baden-Württemberg, an academic title can only be withheld when there has been a judicial sentence for a serious crime that has been entered on the person's police record of conduct.[659]

Since at the time of his application for admission to the Rigorosum 1) Rudolf had not been judicially sentenced and 2) such a decision was not expected by him, Rudolf filed a complaint against the University of Stuttgart in the County Court of Stuttgart for failure to act. At the behest of the University of Stuttgart, the County Court Stuttgart stalled on grounds that the ongoing criminal proceeding against Rudolf would have to be concluded before it could be decided whether Rudolf possessed the necessary qualifications for promotion.[660]

After the sentence against Rudolf was handed down in March 1996, the University of Stuttgart advised him that it was in his best interest to withdraw his application for promotion, since otherwise the University most likely would refuse his application because of Rudolf's conviction for a severe crime. Rudolf complied, because he might otherwise have to reckon with the problem that his doctoral work might be unacceptable everywhere else in the world.[661]

By good fortune, in fall 1994 Rudolf obtained a position as a field representative with a firm dealing in corrosion inhibiting products. During her research into 'right-wing businesses', left-wing journalist F. Hundseder stumbled onto the fact that Rudolf was employed at one of them. In the ARD broadcast Panorama in mid-May 1995, this discovery was described as a scandal, and both the company and their employee Rudolf as heinous Neo-Nazis. The company came immediately under such heavy pressure from customers, suppliers, employees and competitors that by mutual agreement they and Rudolf terminated his employment contract in order to prevent further loss to the company. Due to this denunciation by the media, Rudolf lost his job within a few days.

In the current state of German labor law, if in future applications for employment Rudolf were not to mention his revisionist activities and this were to become known to his employer, it would be considered grounds for dismissal. If he duly mentioned these activities, however, he could expect not to find any ordinary employment anywhere in Germany.[662]

Third Step: Persecution through Prosecution

A more complete analysis of the prosecution against Rudolf will be left to other works. Rudolf was accused not only because of Remer's political commentary, which was falsely attributed to Rudolf, but also because of the purely technical conclusions in his Report.[663] In the principal hearing Presiding Judge Dr. Dietmar Mayer stated that the competence of the court did not extend to the evaluation of the scientific validity of the expert report. Because of this, the contents of the expert report were not addressed in the proceeding, but only the question whether the defendant was responsible for Remer's commentary.

In its decision, the court made no secret of the fact that it held revisionist thinking itself to be reprehensible and punishable by increasing the severity of the sentence.[664] However, the sentence against Rudolf to 14 months prison without probation was based on the false contention that Rudolf had at least knowingly contributed to the political commentary contained in Remer's version of his expert report. The court justified its sentence with a tiresomely assembled chain of proofs amounting to 240 pages which in decisive points departed from the actual evidence and which completely ignored the contradictory evidence on the main point of the defense.

The chemical and construction problems of the buildings at Auschwitz dealt with in the Rudolf Report were characterized by the court as "hardly clarifiable details of the National Socialist mass-crimes", thus, under no circumstance a matter of 'common knowledge'.[665]

Rudolf's trial on account of the business with Remer's version ended in summer 1995. Under which star this trial was held was made blindingly clear by a document from the trial records: Rudolf's judges in the District Court of Stuttgart wanted to prevent that they themselves should come under the wheels of denunciation and inquisition, as had the judges of the District Court of Mannheim in the Günter Deckert Case, who were massively criticized by media and politicians, threatened with prosecution, and eventually send to early retirement because they had dared to call a leading revisionist a man of good character and sentence him only to one year imprisonment with probation. Before the opening of the trial against Rudolf, Rudolf's judges therefore carefully inquired with the German Federal Supreme Court with respect to its decision against Günter Deckert and receive an immediate reply.[666] Since the German Federal Supreme Court revised the Deckert decision so many times until a sentence of imprisonment without probation was certain, it is obvious that in the Rudolf Case the same sentence of imprisonment without probation was the only option if the judges wanted to stay out of trouble.

At the same time as the above-mentioned prosecution, there were three other prosecutions underway against Germar Rudolf. In the first case, he was accused of being mainly or at least partially responsible for the publication of the journals Remer Depesche and Deutschland Report.[667] The second involved his publication of the work Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte.[668] The third was directed against an exchange of correspondence between Rudolf and the Cracow Institute for Forensic Research on chemical questions concerning the gas chambers of Auschwitz that was published in Sleipnir, issue 3, 1995.[587]

It was clear already then that these would not be the last measures taken against Rudolf, especially since he intended to defend himself in print. In view of the fact that the District Court of Stuttgart was able to find the defendant guilty contrary to the evidence, one could justifiably fear that in each outstanding trial, the innocent defendant would be found just as guilty, and that he would find himself incarcerated under the terms of several sentences of increasing severity.

In the meantime, Rudolf's home had been searched three times, and each time books, archives, correspondence, technical data and his computer equipment were seized. The principal loss was not that of physical items, but the intellectual loss of data and archive material. The result was that Rudolf could no longer work as a scientist and also could not defend himself unrestrictedly in court, since his resources to do so were continually taken away. Even the standard literature on the Holocaust was confiscated.

Only those who have themselves undergone the same thing can judge the psychological stress caused to an innocent person through undergoing years-long criminal prosecutions. In addition to these psychic burdens, there are the legal expenses to consider. Currently, they can be calculated only with difficulty but, loosely estimated, they must run into a few hundred thousand Dollars. It is clear that at the close of the trial against him, Rudolf was financially ruined for the foreseeable future-quite apart from the fact that for the foreseeable future he would be given no chance to meet these burdens through employment in his profession, at least not within Germany.

Fourth Step: Defamation

At the close of the labor court hearing of the case against the Max-Planck-Institute, the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) published its already mentioned false announcement on the Rudolf Report.

Rudolf not only proved that the expert opinion cited in this announcement by the dpa was wholly fabricated - the MPG distanced itself from the announcement - but also that the report based on the phantom opinion is so false that no expert in the world would embrace it. But this does not hinder the media to spread the announcement far and wide and to use it as proof of the obvious falseness of the Rudolf Report.[669] In the meantime, this false press release even appeared in the media in foreign countries.[670] Since then, Rudolf has been defamed as a right-wing radical,[671] a right-wing extremist,[672] a Neo-Nazi[673] and a brown doctoral candidate.[674] His Report is always named in quotation-marks, and characterized as hack-work[675] or merely as a "false report".[676] Unfounded accusations of xenophobia[677] are accompanied by the false assertion of Judge Dr. Mayer that Rudolf was deeply marked by anti-Semitism, which, since it is wrong, is all the more ferociously maintained.

By 1994, Rudolf had had no success with his attempts to defend himself against the effects of hostile descriptions, but this was due more to financial difficulties than to judicial defeats.[678] But once Rudolf was sentenced for his supposed crime, the media declared open season on him.

Fifth Step: Destruction of the Personal World

When the ARD smeared Rudolf in the most vicious way in its spring 1994 broadcast Report,[679] Rudolf's parents distanced themselves from him and refused to come to his wedding, scheduled for several weeks later. All his relatives joined them in this, except for his siblings.[680] His godmother Hannelore Dörschler distanced herself expressly from the views of the people with whom Rudolf surrounded himself, without knowing with which persons Rudolf actually surrounded himself or what views they held.[681]

When Rudolf's revisionist activity became known in spring 1994, the umbrella organization exerted pressure on Rudolf's organization to expel him. Because of this, his organization convened a session of various of its members that spring, without the knowledge or participation of Rudolf, at which his revisionist activity was discussed. An expulsion process followed that held a hearing on August 20, 1994, and ended by expelling him in the fall.

"The Holocaust and the acknowledgement thereof is the normative foundation of our [German] Constitution. The legitimacy-in the sense of worthiness of acceptance-of the Basic Law is based on the recognition of the fact of National Socialist criminal measures by which Jews were subject to a systematic technical mass murder. Inasmuch as Fraternity Brother Rudolf raises doubts about the deliberate annihilation of the Jews, he also raises doubts about the normative consensus on which the Basic Law is based.

Content (normative consensus) and form (institutional order) of the Basic Law are inextricably interwoven and their substance cannot be altered.

Thereby, Fraternity Brother Rudolf violates our Patria Principle."

The Patria Principle is one of the four principles of the semi-conservative umbrella organization.[684] Today, the principle is primarily understood as meaning constitutional patriotism. It is left to the reader to judge the mental health of the lawyers that composed these pronouncements. The fact is that the decision to expel Rudolf because of the pressure from the superior organization was inescapable, and it was admitted that the decision would have been otherwise, had there been no outside pressure.[685]

Sixth Step: Homelessness

When the police searched Rudolf's home a second time on August 18, 1994, the local media described him as a well-known right-wing extremist personality. In the small village of Jettingen, where Rudolf lived at the time, it was thought necessary to do something to rid the town of this unwelcome citizen. It was made clear to Rudolf's landlord that the community did not wish him to lease a dwelling to Rudolf. It was also made clear to Rudolf's landlord that he should have an interest in getting rid of his lessee, too, since otherwise he would have to deal with such things as that his son could no longer bring his friends home, because their parents would not allow them to enter a house in which Neo-Nazis lived.[686] Therefore, Rudolf's occupancy of the dwelling was terminated as soon as the lease allowed, at a time when his wife expected the birth of their first child within four weeks.[687]

When the landlords of the dwelling that Rudolf had rented thereafter, the couple Sedlatschek of Steinenbronn, learned from the news on June 23, 1995, about the fact that Rudolf had been sentenced to 14 months imprisonment, they had their lawyers communicate the following to him:[688]

"In the name of and on behalf of our clients we hereby terminate immediately the lease under the lease contract executed October 26, 1994, between you and them.

Our clients became aware through the press, by radio, and television that you, Herr Rudolf, were sentenced to 14 months imprisonment by the District Court of Stuttgart for the crime of incitement to racial hatred. Our clients therefore no longer desire to continue the lease.

I am required to demand of you to depart from the dwelling no later than

July 31, 1995

and to surrender the premises to our clients in the agreed-upon condition.

If you fail to comply with this demand, we are authorized to file a complaint without delay."

When Rudolf requested his landlord to withdraw the termination, threatening otherwise he would file a counter-complaint, the landlord threatened eviction. For private reasons, among them that his wife was expecting her second child, he submitted, found a new residence and settled with his landlord out of court.

Seventh Step: Special Treatment

On May 5, 1995, the GRÜNE/Alternative Liste (a radical-left environmental splinter party) of the parliament of Hamburg demanded access to court records in the Rudolf case. Though denied at first, a subsequent request for records access on July 3, 1995, apparently succeeded,[689] although it is not legal to grant access to the court records to outside persons who have no direct interest in a case. It is reasonable to fear that the records may have come into the hands of radical anti-fascist groups, where data on witnesses could be collected and compared.

The dot on the 'i' was the request on October 16, 1994, of the Project for Study of Anti-Semitism, Faculty of Humanities of the University of Tel Aviv, in which a certain Sarah Rembiszewski requested information on the state of Rudolf's prosecution.[690] The judges also were aware of the world-wide attention on the case. Tel Aviv also pressed for records access. Is it possible to hope that records access will remain denied despite the ever more strident pleas out of Tel Aviv, inasmuch as the research institute has no legal claim to such access? Under current law, access to court records cannot normally be granted to outside persons with no interest in a case. If it should turn out that Tel Aviv got access to the records without legal ground, that therefore Jews in Germany still receive Sonderbehandlung (special treatment),[691] presumably a copy of the records will soon appear in the offices of a university that probably would like to have intimate details of the revisionist scene in Germany. It is even likely the records will find their way to other offices where a more active use might be made of them.

After his 14 months prison sentence was confirmed in March 1996 by the German Federal Supreme Court, and considering the prospect of perhaps even more severe convictions in several other pending criminal investigations, probably ending with a summary sentence of up to four years in prison, Rudolf decided to leave Germany with his family and to settle in England, where he thought freedom of speech is more then mere lip service. Having built up a revisionist publishing company abroad, his wife decided at the end of 1998 that she could not bear the life in exile, permanently fearing the extradition of her husband, being separated from all her old friends and relatives, having difficulties to find new friends and acquaintances, and thus heavily suffering from homesickness. Hence, in early 1999, she and their two children returned to Germany and later started the divorce procedure from her husband, leaving him alone in exile.

In fall 1999, when the British media started a smear campaign against Rudolf, the nightmare of his wife became true: Rudolf became fair game of British politics, media and the justice system.[692] Had it been possible for his wife and his children until then to visit Rudolf frequently, this turned out to be extremely difficult ever after, since Rudolf left Europe in late 1999 and entered the USA, where he applied for Political Asylum in October 2000. Especially the abandoned father and his two children suffer terribly under this situation of being almost totally isolated from each other.

In February 2000, Rudolf's father urged him to get sterilized, since it would be irresponsible both for his first family as well as in general-considering the conditions he has to live in-to father any more children:[693]

"Hallo Germar,
[...] If you want to avoid such difficulties in future [...], and you should do this, regarding getting children, I mean, you should do something about it. Don't leave it up to the women. You surely know how easy vasoligature is for a man. Except you want to have more children. But to be honest, you cannot do this to your first family. And especially not in your situation. A chat with the urologist, and it already happened. You are upset about me? So be it. Just see it objectively. [...]
Father""

Formerly, the persecution of the Jews by some Germans led to consideration to get certain Jews sterilized. Today, the persecution of Germans, mainly promoted by some Jewish lobbies, leads to considerations to get Germans sterilized.

In August 2000, a week before he was legally divorced from his wife, Germar Rudolf was told by his mother that his parents had disinherited him and entered his children in their last will instead.

The Author in summer 1991,
while doing the main work
for this expert report

The author in late 2002

Germar Rudolf, a certified chemist, was born on October 29, 1964, in Limburg/Lahn, Germany. Elite High School Diploma (Gymnasium Abitur) in 1983 in Remscheid, followed by study for a certified chemist's degree at the University of Bonn, graduation summa cum laude in September 1989. Completion of compulsory military service with the German Luftwaffe (Air Force). Between October 1990 and June 1993, Mr. Rudolf worked on the preparation of a doctoral thesis at the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart. Despite the highest recommendations, he was forced to withdraw his dissertation, because the University of Stuttgart threatened to rejected it on political grounds (due to his involvement in revisionism).

Since early 1993, he has been the defendant in several criminal prosecutions resulting from the publication of scientific texts; in March 1996, he left his native Germany and went into exile, first England, then, in late 1999, the United States. In late 1996, Mr. Rudolf founded the publishing house Castle Hill Publishers and, simultaneously, a quarterly historical periodical of German language, the aim of which is to deal with critical aspects of contemporary history currently suppressed in all German speaking countries. In 2000, he started publishing English language books on revisionist topics under the imprint of Theses & Dissertations Press, a firm originally established by Robert H. Countess and purchased by Rudolf in summer 2002. Since 2003, he also publishes a quarterly historical language of English language, which focuses on the same topics as his the German periodical.

Since early 1997, Mr. Rudolf is the publisher and responsible editor of the German quarterly journal Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung,and since early 2003, he is also the publisher and responsible editor of the English quarterly journal The Revisionist. Journal for Critical Historical Inquiry (UK address: Castle Hill Publishers, PO Box 118, Hastings TN34 3ZQ; US address: PO Box 257768, Chicago, IL 60625; email: [email protected]), both including many articles by Mr. Rudolf (see online: vho.org/search/d/a.html).

Christlich Demokratische Union, Christian Democratic Union. They actually refused to be called conservative, and rightly so, since only a minority of their members has conservative views, the majority having quite liberal views. The CDU has no section in Bavaria, where the CSU plays its role, though the Bavarian CSU is more conservative than the 'Prussian' CDU.

Today, the German government consists of those who demonstrated against such politics in the 70s and 80s, and as was to be expected, they do even worse in politics: They wage war in Serbia and Afghanistan, and they are increasingly dismantling the Germans' civil rights.

Moreover, the Remer couple could remember as little from this chance meeting as from the two subsequent occasions on which I met them, when I appeared as an unknown, unimportant person among a crowd. (Summer 1991: On the return from my first Auschwitz trip, I accompanied Karl Philipp on a brief visit during a reception on Remer's 80th birthday. Philipp was Remer's friend who had initially contacted me, who had driven me to Auschwitz and helped me there, and who later helped me with all kinds of technical and infrastructural/logistical support. Autumn 1992: Dinner of the defense team during the trial against Remer, after the court had refused to accept me as an expert witness.) The Remers came to know me personally only in January 1995, when the Stuttgart District Court went to Spain to interrogate the Remer couple as part of the trial against me on account of the commentary that Remer had added to the report without asking me. Even then in Spain they needed to ask who I was. They got to know me fairly well only after I had fled to Spain in early 1996, where I resided for four months some 50 miles west of Remer's residence in exile.

Chapter 244 of the German Criminal Code provides that the court may reject evidence on the grounds of 'common knowledge' or complete unsuitability. This happens mostly in 'Holocaust' cases, and, indeed, without examination of the submitted evidence, to determine whether it is actually unsuitable or whether it may be able to defeat 'common knowledge', which it might do if it were superior to evidence previously submitted. In trials against revisionists and also against supposed 'National Socialist criminals,' exculpatory evidence is de facto verboten, a classic indication of a show trial.

VffG 3(2) (1999), p. 208; online: www.vho.org/VffG/1999/2/Zornig208.html. As a consequence of his prosecution, Bock subsequently changed his defense strategy, and when assigned to defend the Australian revisionist Dr. Fredrick Töben in November 1999, he remained completely silent in order to prevent further prosecutions, hence rendering any defense of Dr. Töben impossible.

There is always the possibility that the defense can hire its own stenographer to record the proceedings and type them up later. Then there would have to be a motion to insert this record into the record of the proceedings. Motions of this sort are always denied because the German Code of Criminal Procedures does not provide any rules for such records. In order to defeat the usual refusal of the court to accept such a motion on the grounds that the transcript is factually incorrect, the motion would have to be made either before the dismissal of the witness or immediately after the response of the accused or the defense attorney. Thereby the doubts of the court could be allayed through requestioning of the witnesses or the accused. Although the record of the statements can be entered into the record of the proceedings with the (denied) motion in this way, they will still be irrelevant in appeals and revision procedures. Considering the expense to the accused in time and money of such an effort over the course of, say, a thirty-day trial with twenty witnesses, it should be clear how impractical this scenario is.

The first edition was mailed out in some 15 copies in January 1992, the second in February 1992, the first version of the third edition in November 1992, and a slightly revised version of this edition (second version) in December 1992.

This brochure was mainly written by me (under four pen names), but made fit for publication by Karl Philipp, who made some changes to it and chose Remer as editor and publisher to protect me legally (which worked). As far as I know, Remer was not involved in the actual production of the brochure, and I was never involved in its distribution. Therefore, no link ever existed between my writing the brochure-without any intention to do it for Remer-and the fact that Philipp put Remer's name on it (probably even without Remer knowing it) after I had finished my writings. True, I never complained about it, but there was, realistically seen, no other way than Philipp's way to have this brochure published swiftly-which was necessary since it was a reaction to a series of articles in a weekly newspaper-, and I did not intend to reveal my pen names to anybody anyway, so why bother?
It should be mentioned in this context that this brochure still causes me some trouble in that my use of four pen names for it (Dipl.-Ing. Hans Karl Westphal, engineer; Dr. Werner Kretschmer, barrister, Dr. Christian Konrad, historian, Dr.Dr. Rainer Scholz, chemist and pharmacologist), all of them pretending to have a different academic degree, led to the accusation of dishonesty and attempted confidence trickery (see, e.g., www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/chemistry/not-the-science/). The background of these pen names was not the attempt to impress people with phony doctorates, though I must admit that it can have this effect. I therefore wish to set the record straight by repeating what I stated already elsewhere (www.vho.org/GB/c/GR/CharacterAssassins.html):
The first revisionist publication I was involved in was a brochure with the title Die Zeit lügt!, published in October 1992. It was a reply to two lengthy articles of a certain Till Bastian published in summer 1991 in the German weekly Die Zeit (no. 39, Sept. 18, 1992, p. 104, and no. 40, Sept. 25, 1992, p. 90). This brochure is the fairest writing about the Holocaust controversy that ever appeared, simply for the reason that both articles of Bastian were reprinted in their entirety, and discussed afterwards. The reader always has the means to check both points of view. Nobody else has ever done that before or since-on either side of this discussion.
Nowhere in that brochure is reference made to the special expertise and qualifications of the authors given-simply because these names were added after the brochure was written-nor would the claims and arguments brought forward in this brochure require the qualifications of these experts. Though it was certainly incorrect to do this, I would like to explain why it was done, as it was certainly not done in order to claim qualifications that are actually not present. Let me therefore be a bit more detailed.
In spring and summer 1992, I was called by several defense lawyers as an expert witness in several trials imposed on revisionists in Germany (Udo Walendy, District Court Bielefeld, February 1992; Gerd Honsik, Upper District Court Munich, March 1992; David Irving, County Court Munich, May 1992; Detscher, County Court Munich, July 1992; Max Wahl, District Court Munich, July 1992). In these trials-as in all trials against revisionists-the judges rejected any evidence presented by the defense, including all expert witnesses. In one case, I had to learn that a chemist (me) was rejected because he was neither a toxicologist nor a historian, an engineer (Leuchter) was rejected because he was neither a chemist nor a historian, and a historian (Prof. Haverbeck) was rejected because he was neither a chemist nor an engineer. My conclusions were that one obviously had to be at the same time an engineer, a chemist, a toxicologist, a historian and perhaps even a barrister to be accepted as an expert witness at a German court of law. The legal process being so perverted in Germany, I decided to mock it with a parody by inventing a person with all these features, but then Karl Philipp and I realized that this would be a bit unrealistic, so we split that person into many. That is the background. I think it is both tragic-for the victims of those German kangaroo trials-as well as funny-for the neutral observer to see the desperate attempts of German judges to keep any evidence out-, but the reader does, of course, not have to agree with me on that.

This article was completed after the house search of the small Berlin publishing house Verlag der Freunde at the end of November 1995 (triggered by a revisionist article of mine they had published), when it had become clear that the documentation of my trial intended to be published by this publisher could not appear; taken from Staatsbriefe 1/1996, Verlag Castel del Monte, Postfach 14 06 28, 80456 Munich, pp. 4-8.

For this version, the text of Remer's comments were retyped, trying to keep the layout as close to the original as possible. The original German version of this is available online at www.vho.org/D/Kardinal/Remer.html.

Asides from note 576 compare the book of Demjanjuk's defense lawyer: Yoram Sheftel, The Demjanjuk Affair. The Rise and Fall of the Show Trial, Victor Gollancz, London 1994; cf. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 11, 1995, p. 8.

G. Rudolf and J. Markiewicz, W. Gubala, J. Labedz, "Briefwechsel", Sleipnir, 1(3) (1995) pp. 29-33; online: www.vho.org/D/Kardinal/LeuchterR.html; Engl.: www.vho.org/GB/Books/cq/leuchter.html; G. Rudolf, "Kein Brief ins Gefängnis?", Sleipnir 1(2) (1995), not online. The criminal investigation against me in that case, Public Attorney's Office I in the District Court of Berlin, ref. 81 Js 1385/95, was dropped on March 21, 1996, under sec. 154 German Penal Procedure Rules (StPO), because the expected punishment "would not carry much weight" in comparison to the one expected from the District Court of Stuttgart in my first "thought crime" trial.

The uninitiated reader may be unaware that in Germany there is a division of the Criminal Police called the State Security Department which prosecutes politically motivated crimes. This department, by far the largest of the criminal offices, has separate areas for right-wing extremist, left-wing extremist, and foreign-influenced political crimes, respectively. Those employed in one department tend to have a political opinion hostile to their target group. For example, those in the right-wing extremist department tend to have left-wing, anti-fascist orientations. In addition, the German Federal court system includes State Security Chambers whose only work is to punish politically motivated crimes. The prosecutors who work in these courts were politically trained to deal with such crimes.

In the referenced book by Max Frisch, Herr Biedermann played just the opposite role of a paper criminal, he was the victim of a criminal (and his own gullibility). But this fact was not made clear to the viewer.

There is a detailed discussion of this broadcast in: W. Schlesiger, Der Fall Rudolf, op. cit. (note 91); there Rudolf disputes that he hid behind the pseudonym Ernst Gauss. He had admitted that in the trial in the District Court of Stuttgart, ref. 17 KLs 83/94.

Cf. Die Welt, May 15, 1995: "Unterstützen Unternehmer die rechtsextremen Szene?" (Do Businesses Support the Right-wing Extremist Scene?). As a result of this broadcast, Germar Rudolf's employer was placed under such pressure from his customers, suppliers, competitors, and employees that he terminated Herr Rudolf's employment contract.

H. Lummert thinks that one should stay with the abbreviation for BRD: "Bubisrepublik Deutschland" (Bubis Republic Germany). Approximately 30 witnesses testified that they had never heard Germar Rudolf make anti-Semitic remarks and that he had even protested against their use. There was no contrary testimony. The media likewise ignored a speech at an academic fraternity by Rudolf to students which was clearly pro-Jewish. On May 9, 1995, the court verified that the speech had taken place.

Verdict of the District Court Stuttgart, ref. 17 KLs 83/94, pp. 15, 156ff. As evidence the court used an unpublished writing of the accused. In it, Rudolf commented how the confirmation of revisionist theses might embarrass Jews. Records of the District Court Stuttgart, ref. 17 KLs 83/94, Computer Data File 3, introduced on Jan. 26, 1995. Where there is racism in these speculative remarks is unclear.

This is the trick used to send revisionists to jail: Since everyone knows that the Holocaust happened, revisionists must know it also. When they still assert the opposite, they must do so wittingly and therefore they lie. Whoever lies has evil intentions and therefore belongs behind bars. Such is the logic of terror.

Germar Rudolf's doctoral supervisor, Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. H. G. von Schnering, as well as several other professors at the Max- Planck- Institute for Solid State Research received the pirated version on this day: decision, District Court Stuttgart, ref. 17 KLs 83/94, p. 126.

A later letter of the Central Council of Jews to the President of the MPG on June 22, 1993, refers to this telephone call. Facsimile published in Wilhelm Schlesiger, Der Fall Rudolf, op. cit. (note 91); from the records of the Labor Court Stuttgart in the case Rudolf v. Max- Planck- Institute for Solid State Research, ref. 14 Ca 6663/93.

According to information from his secretary, Prof. Simon knew what role he was being forced to play, but for opportunistic reasons he put his career and the reputation of the Max-Planck-Institute ahead of upholding the principles of scientific research; information received from my former wife who still workes at this institute. On this affair, cf. also Prof. Simon's revealing statements and the discussion on the social taboo that must be observed by German scientists in: W. Schlesiger, Der Fall Rudolf, (note 91).

Labor Court of Stuttgart, ref. 14 Ca 6663/93. A detailed description of the events in the Max-Planck-Institute and elsewhere about the Rudolf report during the year 1993, with a series of reproduced documents, can be found in the brochure W. Schlesiger, The Rudolf Case, op. cit. (note 91).

Ref. IX 1496/79, decision on March 18, 1981. At that time, a person who had been convicted to five years imprisonment for a drug offense which was entered in his police record, was certified as having the necessary ethical qualification, and the University was ordered to admit him to the Rigorosum. In this decision, it was held that this Hitler law is still in effect because it does not contain National Socialist thinking and should be considered as having been legally enacted.

Ref. 13 K 1329/94. After the prison sentence against Rudolf was announced, Rudolf's doctoral supervisor commented that he would have to sit out his punishment before he could complete his doctoral program. Prof. von Schnering was apparently always ready to stand behind his candidate.

Trial District Court Stuttgart, ref. 17 KLs 83/94, Letter of the 17th Criminal Justice Chamber of the District Court of Stuttgart to the Federal High Court (BGH) on April 21, 1994. Investigation File 2, sheet 768. Answer of the Federal High Court on April 26, 1994 with enclosure: decision on March 15, 1994 re: G. A. Deckert, ref. 1 StR 179/93.

Sheet 1411 of the Records in Trial District Court Stuttgart, ref. 17 KLs 83/94, with the hand-written note by Dr. Mayer that access to the records should be granted after records had been returned by the defense.